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THE 





CONFLICT OF RAC 





The Migration of the Manufacturing Industries of the United 
States and Europe | 


To THE ¢ 


EASTERN SHORES OF ASIA. 





The spread of Opium Smoking, Leprosy and other 
Imported Evils. 





BY 


WASHINGTON M. RYER, M. D. 


San FRANCISCO, CAL. 
> 


P. J. THOMAS, PRINTER AND PUBLISHER, 
505 Cray STREET, 
1886. 


4 * 








Mi : \ 


T33le aif 


THE CONFLICT OF RACES. 


Asiatic Labor.—Its Relations to the Manufac- 
tures of the United States and HEurope.— The 
Pro-Chinese Press. 


vr (aE Managing Editors of the greater number of papers 
{453 published in the States east of the Rocky Mountains, 
have not themselves, nor have they permitted corres- 
pondents to spread before the readers of their papers, an 
impartial statement of the strife between Mongolian and 
white labor. 

If there are any persons who believe that they will give 
both sides an equal showing in the columns of their papers, 
let such persons write an article and headit thus: ‘‘Another 
murder of mnocent Chinamen! Their houses burned and theur 
property stolen! All the Chinamen are driven,by a mob from 
the town without an hour’s notice! Hoodlums rioting among 
the ruins! Outrages upon a docile and harmless people !” 

Under these or other startling headings let the writer ex- 
aggerate to his fullest capacity, even to the extent that truth 
may be left so far behind as to be out of sight. 

When this article is long enough and horrible enough to 
suit Hastern prejudice, let it be sent to any editor in the 
Atlantic States, and it will certainly appear in his paper 
the day after its receipt accompanied by an editorial calling 
upon the whole National force to put an end to such violence. 

On the other hand, let these same persons write an ar- 
ticle as carefully as possible, to avoid all expressions likely 
to offend the readers of the paper, and in the article set 
forth: that, by reason of the existence of the many Chinese 
wash-houses in the towns of the Pacific States, poor women 
who are accustomed to earn their living by washing clothes, 
ean get no employment and are now in a condition of want 
approaching starvation: 





DO \9 4 8D 


4 ; 

That, because of Chinamen having superior strength and 
not being subjected to the infirmities peculiar to womanhood, 
and their being accustomed to a cheap mode of living, they ~ 
have been enabled to underwork women in all that may be 
done with the sewing machine: 

That Chinamen have taken the places of women in almost | 
every factory: 

That they have taken the place of women in the kitoHe? 
and even to the work of the chambermaid: 

That, therefore, having had the occupations which have 
heretofore supported these women in a respectable manner 
taken from them, there now remains for them a life of want 
and deprivation, or a life of disgrace and shame: 

That Chinamen have taken the place of white men in the 
cotton, silk, woolen and other mills: 

That they have thrown out of employment, by taking their 
places, men who have learned the tinner’s, shoemaker’s, 
cigar, broom-making, tailor’s, tanner’s and Miher trades, re- 
quiring skillful manipulation; and that these men and their 
families are now in the desperation of want. 

Let this sorrowful tale of suffering caused by the presence 
of the Chinese in the Pacific States be sent to Eastern 
editors. They will read enough of it to learn it is not pro- 
Chinese and they will cast it into the waste basket. They 
will not publish it ! ! . 


Manufacturing Centres being Migratory, what 
effect will a Cheaper Labor have upon Manu- 
facturing Cities in the United States. 


The sympathy for the Mongolian arises to a very great 
extent, from the belief of the greater portion of the people’ 
in the Eastern States, that a profitable trade may yet exist 
between themselves and the Chinese. And they will not 
accept the painful lessons being taught in the Pacific States, — 
that in the conflict of races in the fields of labor, their own 
brothers and sisters are vanquished. 

It will be a healthy occupation for Hastern editors and - 
ministers, and all who should direct public opinion, to ask 
themselves questions like the following: 


5 


Does the history of manufactures, whether ancient or 
modern, teach otherwise than that they have rested with 
cities or with nations but a brief period of time; and that 
. superior skill or greater facility for manufacturing have 
changed their location? In modern times abundance of 
coal and cheaper labor have located the factories. 

If, then, manufacturing centres are migratory, and cheaper 
, production, the result of cheaper labor, is to govern the loca- 
tion; who, of all the people of this world, can furnish this 
cheaper labor in the greatest abundance ? 

But is this labor competent to manage and operate facto- 
ries in competition with the European races? If it has been 
successful, and shown to be competent in the Pacific States, 
why not in the other States of the Union? If in the 
United States it is proved to be competent, why not in the 
seaport towns of China or Japan? 


The Competition concerns the Manufacturing 
Cities of the Atlantic more than the Cities de- 
pending upon Agriculture. 


Whether Asiatic labor and its effects, most concern the 
Western or the Eastern States can be readily discovered by 
a few questions. 

What are the resources of all the Eastern, and some of the 
Middle States, other than that depending upon their fac- 
tories and the work of their mechanics? If, then, these 
States have no other resources of importance, and the 
people depend upon their factories for sustenance, and the 
factories find no market for their products, what will be the 
condition of affairs in these States? 

Suppose a plant of machinery, of the best and most 
modern structure, is placed in a country whose labor is so 
abundant as to forbid strikes, trade unions, and such organi- 
zations, aS can only exist where the demand for labor is 
greater than the supply, and this plant of machinery for a 
while is directed by an European superintendent, and the 
Jaborer is paid twenty cents for a day of twelve hours’ work, 
and the product of this plant is sold in the markets at a price 


6 


less than it can be sold for if manufactured by similar fac- 
tories in the United States, what effect would that have? 
Ah, but we may reduce the wages of our laborers! But can 
the wages of the white laborer be reduced so as to success- 
fully compete with men who have, from the beginning of 
their lives, been accustomed to live upon such simple food 
that ten or fifteen cents a day is a large price to pay for their 
board, even when they work at the high wages paid in the 
United States? 

But we can protect ourselves with a tariff ! 

Where, then, is your trade with foreign countries? High- 
priced labor may be temporarily created by a tariff, but its 
product can only be sold within the boundaries of the coun- 
try protected. The markets of the world are only open to 
the best that can be purchased at the lowest price. 

If, then, history from the beginning has always shown 
that the manufacturing centres are of so migratory a char- 
acter that superior facilities will remove them, what special 
qualities belong to the Hastern States and to Great Britain 
which will retain the location there? 

Wise men, instead of condemning the defeated working- 
men and working-women of their own race, supplanted, as 
they have been, in the labor fields of the Pacific States;. 
instead of toadying to the Chinese and bending the 
‘‘phant hinges of the knee,” where they suppose ‘thrift 
may follow fawning,” would have learned something which 
they seem not now to comprehend, by properly studying the 
subtlety, cunning, treachery, immoralities and the depraved 
habits of the class of humanity which has upon American 
soil, and under great disadvantages, been enabled to take 
the places of Huropeans in almost every department of labor 
in the Pacific Coast States. | | 


The Trade with China of the Past.—It gives no 
Assurance of a Profitable Future. 
The China and the Indies of the past are not the same as 


they are at present nor as they will be in the future. All 
who read of the fortunes made in trade with China had 


ri 


better put it clearly in their mind, that it is not the present 
buat the past in which these profits were made. The people 
who can beat us on our own soil by their superior cunning, 
are not likely to let us get away with them in their own 
country in the future. 

A few questions may suggest answers which will lead us 
away from past errors. Is it not certified to by the most 
competent authorities that China is well endowed with coal, 
iron and other metals; and the territory of surrounding 
nations and the islands of the Pacific Ocean can, with China, 
so soon as the mines are well opened, fully supply the wants 
of all the factories necessary to do the manufacturing of the 
world ? 

The population of Japan, being a little more than that of 
Great Britain and Ireland, or little less than that of France, 
number 37,500,000. The Empire of China has a population 
variously estimated between 300,000,000 and 450,000,000. 
Hindostan counts 250,000,000. Now, add to these the pop- 
ulation of the contiguous territories and islands, and you 
lave the enormous number of Yellow Skins whose aggregate 
is more than twice that of the entire white population of the 
world. A source of supply to the fields of labor twice 
oreater than has heretofore existed, now open, and the Euro- 
pean may contemplate the degradation which must follow in 
the competition between his own and the millions ofa baser 
race. 

How the inevitable future is indicated by the bending to- 
wards it, is seen in the modified taste which now decorates 
the homes of the wealthy with Chinese and Japanese manu- 
factures. The marvelous prices paid for the handiwork of 
these people is a tribute to their skill, or an act of idiocy on 
the part of the buyers. Enter a Japanese, Chinese or East 
India store; examine the works in bronze, porcelain and 
other wares; the silks, embroideries, carvings, etc., etc.; 
study the patient and continuous labor necessary to produce 
these effects, and then consider if it is violent or far-fetched 
to suggest that the fingers which did these works could, 
when directed by an European superintendent, enter success- 
fully into competition with Hwropeans.. Cultivate their taste 


t 
a 
8 ) 


so as to conform to that of the European, give them the most 
approved machinery, let them be directed by a skilled Kuro- 
pean superintendent, and what they can accomplish is better 
known in California than in any other partof the world. To 
the pro-Chinese advocates of the East, who each have come 
in contact with about six Chinamen in their entire lives and 
who believe Californians to be only ‘‘roughs” and ‘‘hoodlums” 
and who have taken the ‘‘ childlike and bland” Chinaman to 
their sympathetic care, we would suggest that they learn some- 
thing from the great conflict of the two races in the fields of 
labor in the Pacific States; not losing sight of the fact that 
the white man is upon his own soil, and the Mongolian is a 
foreigner, and for awhile after arrival in this country does not 
understand the language of the country—all these advantages 
being in favor of the whites. He may find in the answer to 
questions like the following that | 


A Cloud is coming from the West whose dark 
shadows will forever rest over Eastern Cities, 


And, in its pall of demoralization, wreck their manufac- 
turing enterprises and bring desolation, ruin and despair 
unto the people. 

Have not all the kinds of work that the sewing machine is 
capable of doing by the hands of white men and women been 
done, and are they not now being done by the same machine 
when driven by Chinamen? Have they not taken the place 
of white men and women in almost every department of silk, 
woolen, jute, cotton and other factories? Have not the 
Chinamen driven from their trades, tinners, shoemakers, the 
makers of overalls and shirts; tailors, cigarmakers, butchers, 
saddlers, gardeners and every trade requiring handiwork—a,. 
very large number, because of their cheaper labor? And do, 
they not in San Francisco own and run with Chinese opera- 
tives thirty-eight shoe factories, each factory employing on 
an average about 100 Chinamen? Thus showing that three 
Chinamen are working in the shoe factories, with the best 
Kastern machinery, in the city of San Francisco, to every 
one white man. Do we not find the Chinamen in all the 


9 


Pacific States engaged as merchants, insurance agents, 
bankers, and in every occupation ordinarily pursued by the 
Caucasian? Are there not many Chinese in the Pacific 
States who are millionaires, from the accretions of their mer- 
cantile and manufacturing operations? and have not many of 
these capitalists been enabled, first by underselling or other- 
wise securing the customers, to become by purchase the 
owners and operators of many of the most profitable fac- 
tories of the Pacific Coast ? 

When we look at the bright and intelligent faces of the 
Kuropean, and then at the dull, stupid, expressionless face of 
the Mongolian, we cannot believe the statements here made. 
But when we turn and see the Chinese in the factories, and 
the white men and women begging for the privilege to work, 
that they may earn their bread, the truth is realized, and the 
statement only fails of being correct because of its feeble- 
ness. 3 

A stranger for the first time looking at a steam engine 
would see only the black iron and complicated machinery, 
but he would have no conception of the power hidden from 
his view. So, when looking at the dull and stupid appearing 
Chinaman, we cannot discover the especial gifts and quali- 
ties which render him so dangerous as a competitor or as a 
laborer. 

We extract the following from the work of James A. Whit- 
ney, LL.D.: 

‘‘T shall never forget my first sight, years ago, in San 
Francisco, of a Chinese artisan at his work. It was only 
the making of cigars, but the tawny fingers moved as if di- 
rected by the regular stroke of steam, and with an accuracy 
that no mechanism could surpass. Making no haste and no 
pause, impassive to the curious gaze of the onlooker, his 
horizon apparently bounded by the space of the bench be- 
fore him, stunted in figure, and with the dull, animalized 
visage peculiar to his race, he stood, a being trained to manual 
dexterity by forty centuries of labor, but devoid of the 
wants, the aspirations, the high humanity, with all its at- 
tendant needs, which forty centuries of intellectual, emo- 
tional and physical advancement have given to the. races 


with which time and circumstance have brought him face to 
face.” 


10 


The Ox of the Pacific is now being Gored.— The 
Ox of the Atlantic will soon be. 


The Eastern States are comparatively free from the evil of 
competition at this time. They, therefore, can ‘‘speak 
patience to those that wring under the load of sorrow. But 
no man’s virtue or sufficiency, to be so moral when he shall 
endure the like himself.” What Asiatic competition will do 
for the cities of the Atlantic States is now being fore- 
shadowed. Rev. H. W. Beecher said: ‘‘ From the Hast I 
believe is to come a civilization that will yet make the 
nations of Europe tremble. We have got to learn these 
things, and if the average European or American, with his 
superior opportunities, cannot beat the Chinaman he must 
be content to be beaten by him.” 

But a short time since the German Minister notified the 
Pekin Government that if the local authorities interfered 
with any of his countrymen in the building or operating of 
factories in the seaport towns of China, to which they were 
admitted by treaty, the whole force of the German Empire 
would be brought to bear upon China. At this time the 
buildings for the manufacture of silk, cotton and other 
goods are being erected by Germans, Britains and other 
Europeans. The machinery, being made in Europe, is of 
the most approved kind. Will it not be that the low-priced 
labor of the country will make these first ventures profita- 
ble? And when this is shown, will not thousands rush in to 
establish others ? 

If a manufacturing plant in the State of New Jersey or 
Massachusetts pays but a small percentage on the cost, labor 
being one dollar per day, and a manufacturing plant pays 
twenty or thirty per cent. in Japan, China or Hindostan, 
labor being twenty cents per day, how long will it be before 
the plant of New Jersey or Massachusetts will be found 
migrating towards Asia? You will say it is absurd to talk 
of closing New England or Old England factories. - It is too 
far-fetched! Itis wild! It is, however, the same quality of 
prognosis that might have ten years ago foretold that Cal- 
cutta factories would close those of Dundee; for at this time 


11 


the greater part of the jute raised is made into merchantable 
goods in the city of Calcutta. Wheat bags, which Dundee 
sold for fifteen cents, Calcutta can sell at five and six cents. 

Who would have ventured to say, ten years ago, that Brit- 
ish landlords would try to sell their lands for Government 
consols, and that the wheat raised by the low-priced labor 
of India would make farming unprofitable both in England 
and the United States? But are not these existing facts ? 

If, then, the cheaper labor has captured the wheat market, 
and the manufacture of jute is tending towards the Indies, 
why may not silk, cotton and other factories gravitate to- 
wards the countries of low-priced labor? ‘There never was 
an epoch in human existence when men did not search to 
buy at the lowest price. This being a fixed quality of the 
human mind, where will be the market for the sale of the 
products of the factories which pay the highest price for 
their labor ? 


A One-sided Treaty and an Unprojfitable Com- 
merce. 


There are less than one thousand Americans in China, and 
these are permitted to live only in certain districts. There 
are over 200,000 Chinamen living in the United States, and 
these are permitted to live anywhere; and if their interest 
suggests it they may open an opium-den or a wash-house 
next to the palace of any of our millionaires. 

The total value of merchandise exported from the United 
States to China during the fiscal year 1885 was $6,396,500. 
This includes the export to Hongkong. By contrast our 
export to Great Britain the same year was $398, 103,203. 

‘The import from China the same year amounted to $16,- 
292,169, two-thirds of these imports being admitted free. 
The specie drawn the same year was $14,573,233, exclusive 
of the amount drawn secretly away by the coolies working . 
in our mines and factories. 

How much money is taken or sent away by those who 
will give no statement cannot be known; but it is believed 
by many who are quite competent to judge that $25,000,000 


12 


will not be too high a figure to place the money taken from 
the United States to China during the last year. 

What country trades with China that has not the balance 
of trade in favor of China? Why should we desire to 
_ trade with a country to whom we have to pay tribute ? 

When the contemplated 10,000 miles of railroad is built 
in China, and these subtle, cunning, industrious and cheap- 
living people appreciate their own strength, then comes 
to the Hastern States some of the realizations now existing 
in the Pacific States. 

The Pacific States-are, in a measure, a barrier to the East- 
ern States as against Chinese invasion; but to the products 
of the manufactures of the seaport towns of Asia, the Eastern 
cities must, in the markets of the world, be prepared for a 
competition such as never existed before. In the fate which 
will inevitably overtake them let them have ‘‘no rioting,” 
‘*no hoodlums;” but let them act as they now preach, and, as 
Beecher suggests, ‘‘if they cannot beat the Chinamen they 
must be contented to be beaten by them.” Who believes 
that the future in New York, Boston and Philadelphia, will 
show less hostility to the Chinese than San Francisco ? 
Surely, they are only those who do not know how desperate 
the conflict is between the races in the labor field. 


The Opening of Astatic Ports the #irst Step to 
National Suicide. 

It is a curious feature of the progress of China that. she 
has been compelled to all her foreign relations. In 1796 the 
Emperor prohibited the use of opium, and means were taken 
to stay its use. In after years Great Britain opened five 
ports to its own commerce, took the island of Hong Kong, 
demanded $21,000,000 as an indemnity, and then forced the 
opium trade upon the natives. 

How the bees swarm and multiply when the hives are 
opened; how the boomerang often returns to destroy the 
thrower; how vengeance often smites the wrong-doer; may 
be paralleled when the Chinamen, by their dexterous and 
cheap labor, begin to close British workshops. 


r 13 


War gave its victories to Great Britain. The victories of 
peace will rest with China. 

The effect of railroads connecting distant provinces is to 
bring all the people in daily communication in the affairs of 
commerce and of state. 

These daily associations tend to destroy castes and pre- 
judices, and lead to unity and consolidation. In India 
there was open to traffic in March, 1885, more than 12,000 
miles of railroad, and there was under contract for construc- 
tion 3,550. To double or treble the number of miles of 
railroad will be to double or treble the resources of the 
country; and if 12,000 miles of railroad does open a country 
which can lessen the value of wheat throughout the world, 
what may the additional miles do with cotton and other pro- 
ducts of the soil? 

There being 26,000,000 Britons and 266,000,000 Hindos- 
tanees, how long will it be before that country becomes an 
independent sovereignty ? 

The coal-beds of Europe have long been worked; each 
year the difficulty of working increases as the time of ex- 
haustion approaches. The exhaustion of the coal beds 
means the departure of manufactures and the approach of 
political decrepitude. 

The coal beds of Asia are but being opened; raw material, 
as silk, cotton, flax, jute, etc., can be produced at prices to 
compete with the world. The mines of metal are abundant. 
The labor costs one-third the price of labor in England. 
Now, take the lesson that has been taught in the Pacific 
States, but which is not now understood nor appreciated 
east of the Rocky Mountains. The Englishmen as well as the 
American are displaced by the Mongolian as factory hands, 
as laborers in the mechanic arts, as tradesmen, aS owners 
and operators of extensive manufacturing works, as com- 
mercial operators, as shippers, as controllers of monopolies 
and as directors of corporations, etc. As laborers, because 
of the nimble fingers, extraordinary working capacity, many 
hours of labor, and the low price for which their economic 
habits fit them to labor. As operators, because of their 
acute cunning, thorough lack of conscientious scruples to: 


14 


adopt any means to accomplish desired ends, their power of — 
directing great numbers of their own countrymen to any 
enterprise, and the great amount of capital they can bring to | 
their aid. 

From all these, and much more which may be presented 
to our reflection, may we not reasonably apprehend that the 
future of manufacturing England is being shadowed? 
And that the curse of the commercial avarice which opened 
the Asiatic ports to British trade will be visited unto the 
generations following ? 

In Japan and China, the inventions and machinery of 
the Europeans are earnestly sought for. Mining is carried 
on at the Kelung and Kaiping collieries, and in many other 
mines, with European machinery. MKailroads and telegraph 
lines are being built. 

The China Merchants’ Steam Navigation Company, owned 
and operated by the Chinese, runs thirty steamboats. Tien- 
tsin and Foochow will soon be lighted with gas. In the 
dockyards native Chinese handle foreign tools and machinery 
with great success in building boats, engines, etc., and 
manufacturing establishments are being constructed in the 
seaport towns. 


Commerce with a Nation which produces but 
does not Consume, will Exhaust the Nations 
which have the Balance of Trade Against 
Them. 


Machinery has so multipled the productive capacity of 
men that trade has the surfeit of over-production; factories 
are in their workings limited to a partial time, and laborers 
cannot find full employment. What will be the effect of 
adding many millions of laborers to the already too great 
number? Will it not be disastrous unless we can add con- 
sumers adequate to take up and exhaust all that the ad- 
ditional laborers produce ? 

The Chinamen in California who have, from mining or 
mercantile ventures, become millionaires, wear the same 
style of clothing now that they wore when they entered the 


15 


State twenty years ago, and but of little finer texture. 
They live in small apartments, and they limit all their 
personal expenditures to the smallest amount practicable to 
their present condition. Thousands of years of oppressed 
and economic living has so stamped the mind of Chinamen 
that extravagant expenditure for personal adornment or for 
comfort or display is not natural to them, and can only be 
acquired by an almost total change of their mental attri- 
butes. It may be said that as a user-up or destroyer of the 
products of manufacture, it is rare to find a rich Chinese 
family as extravagant or the equal of the family of an ordi- 
nary tradesman of the European race. 

On the one hand the Chinese are not now, nor never will 
be, in proportion to their number, great consumers; and on 
the other hand a Chinese laborer can equal the production 
of a white laborer. When 350,000,000 of these Asiatics are 
supplied with the improved machinery of Huropean manu- 
facturers, where will be found the compensating number to 
use up the product of their factories ? 

China, above all other countries, is better endowed for an 
exporting, with no probability of ever becoming a great im- 
porting country. If, without machinery, China can make all 
nations pay the tribute of the balance of trade in her favor, 
what will she probably do when the machinery, now begin- 
ning to be introduced, goes into operation ? 

The sources of supply of Asiatic labor, to wit: Japan, 
China, Hindostan, contiguous territories and islands, equal a 
population of 800,000,000—a number double that of the 
European race, and shown in the lessons given in the Pacific 
States to be competent to take the place of white laborers. 
That number will, in the future, stamp the price and dictate 
the hours of labor; and the toilers whose skins are fair, and 
who are of a nobler and more dignified manhood, must suc- 
cumb to the degradation following the competition. 

Trade is chiefly valuable to a nation when, by exchange, 
the exports exceed the imports. China is now manufacturing 
many goods which we formerly exported there. Our export 
of manufactured goods to China is already becoming less. 
We import three times as much more in value from China 


16 


than we export to China. They who expect to change that 
order of trade are dreamers, and do not fully appreciate the 
fact that factories built in the seaports of China can work 
labor at less than twenty cents a day. Gravity does not 
more persistently cause water to seek its channels in the 
lowest places, than does competition direct the trade and 
manufacturing interests to the countries of the cheapest labor 
and production. 


As Silent, Irresistible, and Inevitable, as a 
Mishty River, China pours forth its Millions, 
to Populate and Command the Labor and the 
Trade of the Islands and Nations of the 


Pacific. 

Baron Alexander von Hubner, the Austrian Ambassador 
to France, who has recently returned from his travels around 
the world, delivered a discourse at the Oriental Museum in 
Vienna, the following extracts of which are taken from the 
able and exhaustive Report of the Special Committee to the 
Board of Supervisors of the city of San Francisco: 


‘‘The war of England and lIrance against the Celestial 
Empire was an historical fact of world-wide importance, not 
because of the military successes achieved—the most famous 
of which was the plunder aud destruction of the Imperial 
Summer Palace at Pekin—but because the allies cast down 
the walls through which 400,000,000 of inhabitants were her- 
metically closed in from the outside world. . With the inten- 
tion of opening China to the Europeans, the globe has been © 
thrown open to the Chinese. Who travels now-a-days through 
the interior of the Flowery Kingdom? No one, with the 
exception of the Missionaries, whose presence was already 
tolerated there, and in addition to these there are a few ex- 
plorers. But the Chinese are streaming over the greater 
part of the globe, and are also forming colonies, albeit after 
their own fashion. Highly gifted, although inferior to the 
Caucasian in the highest spheres of mental activity; endowed 
with untiring industry; temperate to the utmost abstemious- 
ness; frugal; a born merchant; a first-class cultivator, espe- 
cially in gardening; distinguished in every kind of handicraft, 
the son of the Middle Kingdom, slowly, surely and unre- 
marked is supplanting the Europeans wherever they are 


17 


brought together. I am speaking of them only as I have 
found them. In 1871 the entire English trade with China, 
amounting then as now to £42,000,000 sterling, was trans- 
- acted through English firms. The four great houses, of 
which one was American, were in Shanghai, while the 
smaller ones were distributed among the treaty ports. 
Added to these were the middle-men, as the sale of English 
imports in the interior of the Empire was effected through 
native merchants. In addition to this the firm of Russell & 
Co. owned twenty steamers that kept up the commercial in- 
tercourse between the treaty ports, extending to the Yangtse 
river. Now-a-days, with the exception of some great influ- 
ential English firms, all the same trade, together with the 
Russell steamers, has passed into the hands of Chinese mer- 
chants or of Chinese corporations. In Macao, since nearly 
400 years in possession of tbe Portuguese, are to be seen 
magnificent palaces, some of which date from the sixteenth 
century; they are situated in the finest part of the city, where 
the Chinese were not in the habit of building; and yet the 
greater number of these palaces have passed by purchase into 
the hands of rich Chinese and are now inhabited by them. 

“On my first visit to Singapore, in 1871, the population 
consisted of 100 white families, of 20,000 Malays and a few 
thousand Chinese. On my return there in the beginning of 
1884 the population was divided, according to the official 
census, into 100 white families, 20,000 Malays and 86,000 
Chinese. A new Chinese town had sprung up, with magni- 
ficent stores, beautiful residences and pagodas. Jimagined 
that I was transported to Canton. The country lying to the 
south point of Indo-China, which a few years ago was al- 
most uninhabited, is now filling up with Chinese. The 
number of the sons of the Flowery Kingdom who emigrated 
to that point and to Singapore amounted to 100,000 in 1882, 
to 150,000 in 1883, and last year an important increase to 
these numbers was expected. 3 es 2 

‘*T never met more Chinese in San Francisco than I did 
last summer, and in Australia the Chinese element is ever 
increasing in importance. Zo a man who will do the same 
work for half price all doors are open. Tven in the South Sea 
Islands the influence of Chinese labor is already felt. The 
important trade of the Gilbert Islands is in the hands of a 
great Chinese firm. On the Sandwich Islands the sons of 
the Middle Kingdom are spreading every year. The North 
Americans, until now the rulers of that island under the 
native kings of Hawaii, are already feeling the earth shake 
under their feet, as in vain they resist these inroads. All 

2 


18 


these things have I seen with mine own eyes, excepting in 
Chile and Peru, countries that I did not visit. From official 
documents, however, I extract the fact that, since 1860, 
200,000 Chinese have landed there—an enormous number, 
considering the small European population in those coun- 
tries. 

‘‘Hurope, with her 300,000,000; China, with her 400,- 
000,000, represent, with the exception of India, the two most 
over-populated parts of the world. Both send their sons to 
foreign climes. They consist of two mighty streams, of which 
one is white and the other yellow. In the annals of history 
there is no mention of the migration of such immense masses 
of people. A series of questions now arises. How will the 
status of the old continent be affected by the emigration of 
so many of its sons? Now, suffering from a plethora, after 
such a severe bleeding, will Europe remain in a full, healthy 
condition, or, similar to Spain, will she lapse into a state of 
anemia? Who can tell? What fate is in store for the 
young, rising, aspiring Powers of Central Asia that are 
neither kingdoms nor republics, and what will be the reac- 
tionary effect on the mother country and on Kurope? We 
do not know. What will be the result of the meeting of 
these white and yellow streams? Will they flow peacefully 
on parallel lines in their respective channels, or will their 
commingling lead to chaotic events? We cannot tell. Will 
Christian society and Christian civilization in their present 
form disappear, or will they emerge victorious from the con- 
flict, carrying their living, fruitful, everlasting principles to 
all the corners of the earth? We cannot know. ‘These are 
the unsolved problems, the secrets of the future, hidden 
within the womb of time. What we now distinguish is only 
the first-clangor of the overture of the great drama of the 
coming times. The curtain is not rung up, as the plot is 
only to be worked out in the twentieth century.” 


How the Californians warmed the Serpents tnto 
| Life. 


Of the Asiatics who come to the Pacific States, the Chinese 
are the most subtle, cunning and aggressive, and, as such, 
they are the most feared by merchants and wage-workers. 
A history of their insiduous introduction in the Western 
part of the United States may be seen repeating itself in 
insiduous and gradual introduction in the Hastern States. 


19 


A Book, illustrated by Voegtlin, called ‘‘Chinese in Cali- 
- fornia” contains many important statistics of the gradual 
increase of the Chinese in California. A few extracts from 
this work are given below. 

On the Ist of January, 1850, having been attracted by 
the gold, there were in California, of Chinese, 789 men and 
2women. In January, 1851, there were 4,018 men and 7 
women. In May, 1852, 11,780 men and 7 women. At this 
time the State tried to stay the current of immigration by 
imposing a tax as a license to mine. In 1868, when the 
Burlingame treaty was ratified, there had arrived in Cali- 
fornia, according to estimate, about 80,000 Chinese. How 
many Chinese there are in the United States now, no person 
knows, as a census of the rats in your barn is easier taken 
than a proper count of Chinamen. 

By agreement, and under the auspices of the agents of the 
companies in the British City of Hong Kong (called here 
the Six Companies) who have banded together to compel 
the coolies to fulfil their contracts with them, all of the 
Chinese have come to this country; their passage and ex- 
penses being paid by the Companies, to be repaid with large 
interest by the labor of the coolies. 

The coolies’ obligation to these Companies is greater than 
to the State; the fear of their vengeance, and lest that their 
bodies may not be returned to China by these Companies in 
case of their death, compels them to the utmost servility; 
and they dread the judgments of the tribunal of the Six 
Companies more than they do the judgments of the State 


Courts. | 
For many years after the Chinaman first made his appear- 


ance in California he was looked at as a curiosity; his ob- 
lique eyes, pigtail, costume, manners, utterance, all was 
amusing and interesting; to this was added his innocent 
smile and docile manners, which quite gained the goodwill 
and even the affections of the people. Then the good- 
hearted commenced the missionary work and opened Sabbath 
Schools and led them to the altars of the churches and 
sought to save their souls. They had picnics given to them 
and were entertained as no white persons ever were by 
Christian missionaries. 


20 


The Graveyards show but few Permanent Con- 
versions of Chinese. 


After many years of patient exertion it was found that the 
Christian work bore no fruit; that the Chinaman went to 
Sabbath School only to learn to read and write the English 
language. That so long as his employers dressed him well, — 
gave him Sunday as a holiday, and paid him extra wages, 
just so long he would appear as a devout Christian. He 
was ready to profess his love for the Lord and Jesus Christ 
at any time you would give him an extra dollar a week for 
his wages; and upon your withdrawal of the allowance, he 
would backslide even to mocking the efforts of the kind 
ladies and ministers who sought to make a Christian of him. 

Me foolee clistian minister, heap sabbee leed alle same 
Melican man, belly good, no wantee Jesus Clist.” 

‘One of the most pleasant-looking graveyards in the 
City Cemetery is that of the Christian Chinese. Evergreens, 
gum trees and willows are planted there. When the plot 
was obtained there was probably a hope that all the Chinese » 
in the State were to be converted, as there is room enough 
for thousands of graves in this burial ground, but notwith- 
standing its capacious size and agreeable surroundings, only 
eight persons are buried in this spot, and- two of them are 
Japanese, who lay by each other apart from the Chinese. 
Little marble headstones are over the graves. On one is 
this inscription: ‘Lum Sing Choy, Died November 28, 
1883, aged 38 years. Trusting in the Lord.’ On another 
is: ‘Ah Kay, Died June 22, 1882, aged 18 years. Having 
found the Saviour.’ 

‘«The headstones over the Japanese record the deaths of 
M. Sugawara and Okita Toyo Jiro, who ‘Died in the faith 
of Christ.’ ” 

The very graveyards testify to the small fruits of thirty- 
five years of Christian efforts among the Chinese on the 
Pacific Coast. 

The stories told by missionaries of the conversions of 
Chinese are for the most part such exaggerations as to be- 
come positive falsehoods. 

If any have been converted to Christ, and are not kept in 
the Christian faith by a direct pecuniary gain, they are not 
found in California by any ordinary discoverer. 


21 © 


On the other hand, by the introduction of foul diseases 
and the enticing of young white men and women into their 
opium dens, they have ruined more bodies and destroyed 
the bright future of more souls than all the missionaries of 
America have ever converted of Chinese. 

The Chinese have bought several Christian Churches to 
make Joss-houses, but not in one case have Christians 
bought a Joss-house. 

Let the kind ladies and gentlemen of the East who are 
trying to make wings grow from Chinese shoulder-blades, 
when they get a Chinaman to love the Lord, discharge him, 
or lessen his wages, and then they will discover whether 
the Chinaman was using the Sabbath School as a way to 
heaven, or a way to gain, by learning to read ‘‘alle same 
Melican man.” 


Their Insidious, Subtle,and Relentless Attack; 
and their Victory in the Fields of Industry. 

First, the Chinese established wash-houses at proper dis- 
tances, and in every town in the Pacific States. Then poor 
women could get no more washing to do. Then the Chinese 
learned to cook, by working a few months for very low wages, 
hiring themselves to the wives of mechanics or tradesmen, 
who taught them how to cook as a compensation, in part, for 


their labor. 


HERE 


\\ } ~ 


<< oe < 
a 
ASS 


\, . SS \ 
WSs SX! 
\““ 

2S 





22 


Becoming experts, they soon displaced women as cooks. 
‘Then they applied themselves to the sewing-machine; and 
being stronger than women they took the place of women at 
the sewing-machine. Then they entered the cotton, silk, 
woolen, shoe and other factories, and soon the white menus 
were discharged to make room for the Chinese. 

In a little time very many of the factories were bought 
by wealthy Chinamen, who organized them as joint stock 
companies. For the reason that a boss Chinaman can hire a 
laboring Chinaman at from ten to twenty per cent. less than 
a white person can hire him, the factories owned by the 
Chinese can undersell the factories owned by the white 
man. Asa result, the Chinese have been enabled to pur- 
chase the manufacturing plant from Americans often at a 
sacrifice. 

It is well to understand this, for it has most important 
bearings on all the enterprises undertaken either in America 
or China: that a Chinese merchant or manufacturer can al- 
ways command the labor of his own countrymen at a consider- 
able per cent. less than a Huropean can. 

This fact has enabled them to take from foreigners the 
trade of the seaport towns of China which was once held by 
Europeans. 

In the Yangtse-Kiang river, and the ports of Chin-Kiang 
and Hang-Choo, the Chinese have taken the transportation 
and trade from foreigners. 


Why Boss Chinamen Command the Situation. 


The lessons taught in California are that Chinese labor is 
the most abundant and the cheapest, and that a Boss China- 
man can command that labor at from ten to twenty per cent. less 
than the European. Asa result, Chinese capitalists can run 
factories and operate in trade, at from ten to twenty per cent. 
of an advantage over Europeans. 

The lessons taught in China are that factories and steam- 
ers, built by foreigners, are now run by Chinese and owned 
by them, and that the commercial enterprises inaugurated 
by Europeans are fast falling into the hands of the Chinese. 


23 


It being a positive truth that a Chinese merchant or cap- 
italist can command the labor of his countrymen at a less 
price than a European, and that they are competent to man- 
age extensive manufacturing establishments, of silk, cotton, 
woolen, jute and other material, and ‘turn out from their 
factories almost everything the European can; where, then, 
is the opening in the trade with China which the Eastern 
merchant finds is of such importance as to justify the sacri- 
fice of the white people on the Pacific Coast? 


All that Chinese Labor has Accomplished. could 
have been Better Done by White Labor. 


To justify themselves in the crime of condemning the 
Pacific States to a coolie system, which they themselves 
would not endure without more mob violence and murder 
than has been committed on the Pacific Coast, the presump- 
tuous moralist and the press of the Atlantic States advance 
the argument that ‘‘ without Chinese labor the Pacific States 
would not have advanced as rapidly as they have done.” It 
may be said in reply, that an advancement with an incubus 
like the contamination of the Chinese, is like the growth of a 
child with a malignant tumor upon his back. At the time of 
manhood death comes of the malignancy. 

They who now enter the Pacific States in search of homes 
are of the well-grounded opinion, that it would have been 
better for the future of these States if their growth had been 
much slower. The owners of large tracts of land, who have 
desired to realize in their time the highest price, are be- 
levers in a rapid growth, but they who by their labor make 
homes for all time, by subjecting the land to the best of cul- 
tivation, would have been better contented with a slower 
growth. 

It is advanced by the transcontinentals that the Chinamen 
have been of benefit because they built the railroads. More 
miles of railroad were built at the same time, and under 
similar endowment, by the Union Pacific with white labor 
than were built by the Central Pacific with Chinese labor. 
The money paid for the labor of the construction of the Union 
Pacific remained in the country, and many of the laborers 


24 


on that road afterwards made comfortable homes on the land 
which now pays, and will forever pay tribute to the road. 
The money paid out for labor by the Central Pacific, for the 
most part, was sent to Asia, and the Chinese have not made 
homes on the contiguous land to pay a like tribute to the 
au To say the Central Pacific Railroad Company could 
not get white laborers is a superficial absurdity. They 
wanted the cheaper labor, and therefore took the Chinese. 
There has not been a mile of railroad constructed on the 
Pacific Coast which could not have been done by white 
labor. If the directors, who let the contracts to themselves, 
had been contented with pocketing less of the profits. of con- — 
struction, and if they had sought to find white labor where . 
it could easily have been found, there would have been no 
need of employing the Chinese. 


The Golden Placer’s Tribute to China. | 


For thirty-five years the Chinamen have been working in 
the placer mines. The largest portion of the gold taken out 
by them has been sent to China. All they have taken out 
would have been, in proper time, taken out by white men, 
and it would have remained in the country. When men 
temporarily leave a placer mine to work a better one, it is 
not such an abandonment as should give its proceeds to a 
foreign country; for that which is not the best one year be- 
comes the best the following. When men left a claim pay- 
ing eight dollars for one paying ten, they expected to return 
to it when the ten dollar claim became exhausted. When 
the Chinese took possession of the claim it was forever closed 
against the European. The leech is no more earnest to get 
the last drop of blood than the Chinaman is to exhaust. 

Californians have rushed into wine-making and _ fruit- 
raising without proper deliberation or experience. They 
have planted improper kinds of grapes, as a_ result, 
made some very bad wine, and the memory of wine- 
drinkers will for a long time affect the drinking of the better 
wine now made. They have planted fruit trees without 
proper care in selection. Because of the number of acres 


\ 


25 


put into orchards, the production is beyond the capacity of 
the market. If they had had no Chinese labor the wine- 
growers and the fruit-producers would have been slower; 
they would have exercised better judgment and with better 
results. 


The Rivers Protest and Wash Away their Works. 


_ The work of reclamation of swamp lands by the hands of 
the Chinese was done by taking the dirt from the surface 
of the land on the border of a water-course and loosely 
piling it up as a levee. Nearly all this work has been 
washed away by the high waters of the winters, and there 
are now but few, if any, successful reclamations of swamp 
land which have been made by Chinese labor. 

Americans now do the work of reclamation (in most cases 
on the land which has been once leveed by the Chinese) 
by getting the heavy material from the bottom of the river 
and placing it into levees by the aid of steam dredgers. 
This manner of reclamation is a success. Had not the 
temptation of cheap labor ‘been presented, the Americans 
would have built the steam dredgers before this time. The 
works of the Chinamen having been so easily washed away, 
many have been discouraged, and the belief of the imprac- 
ticability of reclamation has become so general as to seri- 
ously impede the progress. If the taking of the surface 
dirt, to make levees with hand labor, had never been at- 
tempted, machine work would have long before this proved 
reclamation a positive success. 

The Chinese have at no time in the history of the Pacific 
States been of benefit sufficient to offset the vice and demor- 
alization they have caused by their presence. 


The Change which has Come to the Minds of 
Californians. 


Even they who believe that rapid development was the 
better policy do now advocate the expulsion of the Chinese, 
as being destructive to the future welfare of the country. 
They were pro-Chinese; they are now anti-Chinese. The 


26 


same mental change will occur to all except the fanatics of 
the Eastern States. The pro-Chinese will deny and repudi- 
ate all they now utter. 

The interrogation comes very often from the Hast: ‘‘ If the 
Chinese are oh a curse why do you employ them?” They 
who ask that question, always employ the cheapest and most 
available labor themselves. Did not Pennsylvania mine- 
owners bring the low Hungarians? And are the Massachu- 
setts manufacturers blameless in the employment of the low- 
class French of Canada? They affect to believe that club 
and gambling houses, liquor saloons, houses of prostitution, 
pugilistic encounters, cock-fighting, lotteries and evil assem- 
blies are bad in themselves, and tend to vitiate and demor- 
alize the community: But they patronize them all the same, 
and without their patronage they could not exist to so great 
an extent. They repeat the Decalogue every Sabbath, and 
violate its commandments before the next. They would do 
unto others as they would have others do unto them, and 
then in preaching, voting and influence do all they can to 
blast the bright hopes of their brothers and sisters who 
dwell on the Pacific Coast. | 


The Chinese are Bolder Strikers than the Knights 
of Labor. 


They say in the Hast: ‘‘They are tired of strikes, labor 
organizations and the quarrelsome Irish.” Upon the theory 
of one extreme following another, they are prepared to 
‘‘swallow a camel.” They take to their embrace the leprous, 
opium-smoking Chinaman, as if that ‘‘innocent and peace- 
ful stranger” were not as rampant in striking as the ‘‘ vilest 
Kuropean.”’ | 

In Asia the superabundance of labor will prevent strikes. 
In the United States, strikes can be successful only as long 
as the labor field is not abundantly supplied. labor is an 
article of trade, its value is governed by its scarcity or 
abundance. 

The number of Chinese in the United States is not so 
great as to cause them to enter into competition with them- 


27 


selves; the Six Companies’ organization, so direct the la- 
borers, and so apportion them to different sections, that they 
donot conflict with each other. 

It is a fact that should not be lost sight of, Chinamen 
do not work for one cent less wages than may be necessary 
to take the occupation from the white laborer; and in every 
case where they have acquired the monopoly they have ad- 
- vanced the prices beyond what they were before. If a 
white man works for a dollar a day, and ninety-five or ninety 
cents will cause his removal, the Chinaman will work for 
that price, and when the white man is discharged and has 
left, the Chinaman will strike for higher wages. If a woman 
earns fifty cents a day the Chinaman will work for forty or 
forty-five cents until he gets the trade, then he will demand 
higher wages. 

Every man of the Pacific States will testify that strikes for 
higher wages have been quite as frequent, if not more so, 
with the Chinese as with the whites, their number being 
taken into consideration. In some factories in California 
they have struck and quit the factory because the owner em- 
ployed white men and women. When the owner discharged 
the white laborers, the Chinese returned to work. 

The Chinese suspend the work of a factory until the white 
men and women are discharged! The Knights of Labor 
cannot muster as much gall as that ! 

The Chinese have the monopoly of the pork trade on the 
Pacific. To a butcher who offends them they will not sell any 
portion of a hog. 

No tyrants are more arbitrary when in power than these 
simple-looking, ‘‘childlike and bland” creatures, whom 
President Cleveland calls ‘‘ peaceful and innocent strangers.” 


They have Possession of the Lower Rung of the 
Ladder. 


The progress from poverty to affluence may be likened 
unto the climbing up a ladder. When a man is absolutely 
depending each day for his bread upon his labor, he can 
rise only by putting his foot upon the lower rung of the 


28 


ladder. If that rung-is not there, he cannot rise unless 
some aid is given to him to place him on a higher rung. 
The lower rung of the ladder is in the possession of the 
Chinese, in every State of the Pactfic. 





Adversity has overtaken a brother; he applies at the door 
of a factory, he is denied admittance because the Chinamen 
are in possession; he applies to the tradesman and the farmer; 
he can get no work; the Asiatics have filled all the places; 
the lower rung of the ladder is in their hands. 

A sister in poverty, because of the loss of her protector, 
asks for work on the sewing machine; she cannot get the 
work because the sewing machine is almost exclusively work- 
ed by Chinese. She asks to become a cook, a chambermaid 
or a washwoman; these places are occupied by the Chinese. 
She can get no work. ‘The lower rung of the ladder is taken _ 
from her. 

Do you wonder that there are ‘‘hoodlums”, ‘‘prostitutes’’ 
and all that depravity can manifest in humanity, or that 
crime and violence exist, or that men who are denied the 
privilege to work for their bread resort to the destruction of 
the covert enemies? | : 

The steam-engine has not brains, yet it accomplishes work 
as of millions of men, even to the extent of producing more 


29° 


than can be used; but with the surfeit and over-production 
from this cause, the moral atmosphere is not tainted. Asiatic 
labor adds millions of hands to production, and brings no 
market for the produce. With the Asiatic comes such a 
degradation to labor as makes the superior race shudder at 
the fate which compels them to work by their side. The his- 
tory of the pork monopoly by the Chinese is brief. A boss 
Chinaman buys hogs, butchers them, sells to his own 
countrymen, who eat every part of the hog, including the en- 
trails, and almost everything thrown away by the white 
butchers. The hind quarters and best parts are sold to the 
white butchers. The profit of the China butcher is in the 
refuse parts the Chinese eat, and which the white butcher 
usually throws to hogs. ‘This percentage in their favor 
enables the Chinamen to command the pork butchery. 


The Mixture of Races and its Demoralization. 


Our ancestors living in the colonies bordering on the 
Atlantic Ocean, two hundred and fifty years ago, were en- 
gaged in the lucrative trade of bringing negroes from Africa 
to America. They continued to sell them into slavery as 
long as the trade proved profitable. The ministers of 
the period entered into the spirit of the commercial en- 
terprise of their congregations, and they proclaimed in tri- 
umphant tones from their pulpits on each Sabbath day that 
‘‘the hand of God was being put forth to bring the heathen 
of Africa to where they could sit under the dispensation of 
the Gospel and have their souls rescued from the damnation 
of hell.” 

From these same pulpits (supported by a generation follow- 
ing, who had discovered that their fathers’ commercial avarice 
and hypocrisy was a crime against humanity and demoral- 
izing to the nation) came violent denunciations against 
slavery, and following these was written the bloodiest record 
in the book of time—the war for the partial washing away of 
the curse bestowed upon us by our forefathers. The curse 
_ of our ancestors’ venality was so damnable, that even the 
blood of a million soldiers (their own children) could not 


30 


destroy it. Go, now, into the Southern States; see the mix- 
ture of black and white children in the same play grounds. 
Go into the fields, or the workshop, and behold the bright- 
faced Caucasian drawn down to the level of the negro. Over 
the fair fields, beautiful country and soft climate of the 
South, why hangs the pall of stagnation and almost total non- 
progression ? 

You will ask: why don’t they educate the negro? The 
answer comes: have not the negroes of the North for gen- 
erations been educated by absolute contact with the highest 
civilization, and, being few in numbers, been kept, in a 
measure, from the demoralization resulting from association 
with their own race,:and what progress have they made? In 
the South, if you educate a negro, he falls back, almost to 
his original baseness, after long association with his old 
companions. If the millions of the North cannot make the 
few negroes progressive, how much more difficult to advance 
the negro in the South? The physician may cure a patient 
of typhoid fever if preserved from the causes which pro- 
moted the disease, but if intense malaria exists in the atmos- 
phere around, the probabilities of cure are much lessened. 
If not because of the existence of the negro in the Southern 
States, why do the emigrants turn from its soft airs to the 
blizzards of the North? The South was more conquered 
when the negro was left to shadow all its future, than when 
its armies were destroyed. 

If greater examples of the evils of a mixed population 
were needed we might look to Mexico, the South American 
States, Turkey, and to all the Islands where mixed races 
exist. How history repeats itself, even in the same country 
and among the same people! The slave traffic, with all its 
enormities, was sheltered by the ministers of the Gospel, 
who proclaimed that ‘‘God was sending the heathen of 
Africa to drink of the waters of life.” 


dl 


Moralists who Embrace the Mongolian, and De- 
base their Brothers of a Higher Intelligence. 


And now, in the same land, and, in some instances, from 
the same pulpit, and to the descendants of the vile traders 
whose commercial enterprises caused them to build ships 
and bring slaves to this country, ministers of the Gospel are 
preaching that God is at the same kind of work, and is 
‘‘bringing the heathen Chinese to where the light of the 
Gospel will penetrate his soul and save him from everlasting 
punishment.” 

And editors are following!—but not in a Gospel light. 
They see, in a malarial light, an wgnis fatwus. They think 
they see commercial gain—gain with a people who are not con- 
sumers but producers; gain with a people who are our supe- 
riors in cunning, deceit, and every attribute of commercial 
success. And they would have every steamer, with its low 
fares, bring millions of yellow-skins to darken the social 
state; have our children at school play with the sons and 
daughters of leprosy; commingle with them in every asso- 
ciation of life, in our houses, in our temples, in the work- 
shop, the factory, the street, and all places set apart for 
trade or commerce. They would have them teach our sons, 
whose morals have been most preciously guarded by us 
during their tender years, and our daughters, dearer to us 
than our lives, the smoking of opium, and, in its horrid 
fumes, cause us to see pass forever all the bright hopes we 
have had of their temporal and eternal welfare. 

Already have the Chinese populated the islands of the 
Pacific so as to control its labor. Now they are entering 
Mexico and the British Possessions. Soon, from the North 
and the South, the East and the West, they will come in 
over the borders and, as rats do, prey upon the substance of 
the people. 

Behold the consistency with their professions, and the 
thorough recklessness as to what they confer on their chil- 
dren. Our Puritan ancestors fled from the land of oppres- 
sion to America. Almosttheir first commercial ventures were, 
whilst prating of the ‘‘brotherhood of man,” to bring 


32 


negroes into slavery. And now, under the same avaricious 
impulses and in the pursuit of commercial proiit, the editors, 
ministers, and merchants, of the Hastern cities are seeking to 
debase the high and intellectual condition of the people by 
mixing with them a race whose touch is contamination. 
The doctrine of the ‘‘universal brotherhood of man”’’ 
would find none of the present exponents of the same 
opinion if, by some power, each of them, could be linked, 
as the Siamese twins, to a Chinaman. 

They who wrote that all men were ‘‘ born free and equal”’ 
went to their homes and whipped their slaves to labor. A 
more inconsistent class of people, now in the places they 
occupied, condemn, by the power of their numbers and their 
votes and their influence, men and women of the highest 
civilization and culture, their brothers and sisters, to the 
debasement and contamination of contact with the most 
degraded of races, who have invaded the Pacific States from 
the islands and mainland of Asia. And why? Is it because 
they, like young maidens, have fallen in love at first sight 
with the Mongolian, and are ready to abandon father and 
mother, brothers and sisters? Or is it because they expect 
a lucrative trade with the Chinese? Or is it because they 
hate the Irish and other Kuropean emigrants, and fly to a 
worse extreme ? 


The Testimony Presented by the Supervisors of 
San Francisco. 


In July, 1885, the Committee appointed by the Board of 
Supervisors of the City of San Francisco (Messrs. W. B. 
Farwell, E. B. Pond and John EH. Kunkler) made a thor- 
ough examination of the quarters occupied by the Chinese. 
Their report was endorsed by all the Supervisors and the 
Mayor of the city, and it was printed for public distribu- 
tion. From this report we take the following, regretting 
that the entire report could not be seen and read by every 
man in the United States: 


‘* All great cities have their slums and localities where 
‘({ filth, disease, crime and misery abound; but in‘ the very 


Snippet = ore ra 
eee a 


30 


best aspect which Chinatown can be made to present, it 
must stand apart, conspicuous and beyond them all in the 
extreme degree of these horrible attributes, the rankest out- 
growth of human degradation that can be found upon this 
continent. Here it may be truly said that human beings 
exist under conditions (as regards their mode of life and the 
air they breathe) scarcely one degree above those which the 
rats of our water-front and other vermin live, breathe and 
have their being. And this order of things seems insepara- 
ble from the very nature of the Chinese race.” 


How the Youn’ are Allured to Destruction. 
Dr. Toland, the founder of the Toland Medical College, 
testified before the Committee: 


‘**T have seen boys eight and ten years old with syphilitic 
diseases, which they told me they had contracted of China- 
women on Jackson street. It is astonishing how soon they 
commence indulging in that passion. “Some of the worst 
cases I have ever seen occur in children ten or twelve years 


old.” 


f/f fu 


ig 





a Ni SS 





= Di le 
< == a 


= S| 2 
SSS || aT aaa 
(es a 





Prostitutes enticing young men. 
When Dr. Toland was asked to what extent these diseases 
came from Chinese prostitutes, he said: 


‘“T suppose nine-tenths. When these persons come to — 
me I ask them where they got the disease. They generally 
3 


34 


tell me that they have been with a Chinawoman. I am sat- 
isfied from my experience that nearly all the boys in town 
who have venereal disease contracted it in Chinatown. 
They have no difficulty there, for the prices are so low they 
can go whenever they please. He had never heard or read 
of any country in the world where there are so many chil- 
dren diseased as there are in San Francisco.” 

Dr. J. C. Shorb testified before the Committee, and said: 

‘‘The presence of Chinese women here has made prosti- 
tution exceedingly cheap, and it has given these boys an 
opportunity to gratify themselves at very slight cost. J have 
had boys from twelve years up to eighteen and nineteen— 
any number of them—afilicted with syphilis contracted from 
Chinese prostitutes. The extent of the evil is very general, 
and I suppose my experience must be the experience of all 
the physicians in San Francisco who are in full practice.” 

James R. Rogers testified that he had been special police 
officer in the Chinese quarter four or five years; that the 
prostitutes ‘“‘are held as slaves, bought and sold. They are 
held as prostitutes, and are obliged, by what they call their 
mother, the head woman or boss of the institution, to 
stand at the windows and doors and solicit prostitution. 
Most of the Chinese houses of prostitution are patronized 
by whites—by young men and old ones. I have taken boys 
of not more than ten or twelve years of age from out of these 
houses. The schedule of prices is such that boys can 
afford to go there and patronize them.” 

A mountain of testimony is of like character, and to pub- 
lish it would be only cumulative. The enticement of children 
into these dens of pollution for the purpose of getting from 
them ten, fifteen, or twenty-five cents, is carried to the 
extent that the blood of the rising generation will be so con- 
taminated, that hereditary diseases will extend far into future 
generations. 

These prostitutes are as much the slaves of their owners as 
ever the negroes were in the South, and the proceeds of their | 
iniquity goes into the purses of the men who purchased and 
now own them. These women were bought for a price, im- 
ported under a contract, and are sold for a price. They 
have a market value in this republic where slavery was 
abolished by the blood of millions of our soldiers. Let no 
minister of the Gospel, no pro-Chinese editor, no man, 


30 


** who is like an egg—so full of himself that he won’t hold 

any more,” none who cannot understand or take in the con- 

dition of things on the Pacific Coast, dispute this statement 

until they have learned more than they now know of the 

Chinese. | 

Slavery de facto et non de Jjure.—The Existence 
of Slavery Acknowledged, but by the U. SW. 
laws none but Africans can be Slaves. 

In May, 1886, Lee Ah Dot and Yu Gem were arrested 
upon complaint of Wan Ah*‘Wong, under Section 5377 
of the Revised Statutes of the United States, charging them 
with holding six Chinese women, purchased as slaves in 
China, imported to the United States and hired out for im- 
moral purposes. The prisoners appeared before Judges 
Hoffman and Sabin of the United States District Court on 
writs of habeas corpus. Their arrests were made under the 
law of 1818, and involved the question whether slavery may 
now legally exist in the United States. The statute pro- 
vides that every person who brings within the jurisdiction 
of the United States any negro, mulatto, or person of color, 
from any foreign country, or who sells or holds such a per- 
son as a Slave, shall be fined not more than $10,000 nor less 
- than $1,000, and shall be imprisoned at hard labor not more 
than seven nor less than three years. 

The Court held (there being no testimony taken, and upon 
presentation of the case as charged) that ‘‘ the Thirteenth 
Amendment to the Constitution abolished slavery in the 
United States, and that it did not, therefore, exist within 
our territory. It was further held that a Mongolian is not a 
person of color, within the meaning of Section 5377 of the 
Revised Statutes, and that the law of 1818 only applies to 
negroes. If any persons were held in involuntary servitude 
the offense could not be prosecuted for holding them as 
slaves, for the law does not recognize the existence of 
slavery here. The remedy should be found in the State 
laws.” The Chinamen were discharged. 

The United States Courts cannot find a remedy for as ab- 
solute slavery as ever existed in the South! When the 

United States Courts say the remedy lies in the State Courts 


36 


in any case where a Chinaman is concerned, they become 
facetious, and perpetrate a ‘‘ minstrel” joke to be laughed at; 
for these very Courts have upset every State law made to 
meet such cases. 

Where now are the Abolitionists, who once so abhorred 
slavery that they have purged the nation of the curse? A 
slavery now exists without a remedy. 


The Cubte Air Ordinance. 


The Board of Health of San Francisco, for the protection 
of all, suggested that a certain space should be allowed in 
each dwelling for sanitary purposes. The Board of Super- 
visors passed an ordinance to that effect. The space allowed 
was that which was necessary to the healthful existence, of a 
white man. The following table shows how Chinamen can 
live and sleep in apartments so crowded that it would en- 
danger the lives of white men if subjected to it. This table 
is a fair type of the common manner of living in Chinatown. 








Number of 


rs noe = Vs Number of 
STREET. No. Froor. allowed!” so ctual 
under the Se t 
Cubic Air) CO°TRRBtE: 
law. 
DUPONV ess <cccleisie oss <1 81434 Sub Basement............ 9 32 
EE RIDES OS cet dtmaiclele als ii Basement yess os esc. sane 91 70 
OCF ee Bag ae tent (8 of “e PERG POOR er eewie vee cteiee 7 46 
SSbo Wai © b eteifeletetniecsis re Second WlOor. {3 2. eaten 26 60 
Sein) ielave ‘ele. aie's si6/s\@.s'shs\ + Third Flor: oie cee cnae « 34 68 
Sacramento. 5 A) oe 817 Basementics sesh. Sees 6 24 
Bartlett Alley.........|eccsescscece Basement.. BAe Ac tyc 16 68 
ny Dh a OB eg EEA ys Gree First Floor . ein ted ashe tohlee 6 14 
ONEIAS | PlACO sei alge dite ws fs \epeia we whe soles 10 rooms, First Wican) Beit 81 94 
Brooklyn Place... \...)/s |. csleeesee. | First Floor.......ss...... £ 94 
DP ACKBOD nok s cas « 624 BaseMent is... seece ces 3 5 
I Beg SAS ial a 628 Basements is 6).)..eeecee ve 3 14 
ALTA arenes intetata be lotta fare NY 632 Basement) iis io raeeters 2 6 
Hae AH AG SER TE ee Md Pirst Floors: sepsis 3 16 
6 ET tase Titectts. ale eile rere 620 Basement siis,ccieces geeery 3 14 / 
08 PBA ie MAAK 622 Basement ....0....00% f 4 20, 
SF EAL ore wine ie aie © Wh Basements, is oU.30o enews 6 80: 
COR ested a Sse SEE es First: Story -eec<cae bbs ok 3 6 
66 Ne eet Sta reais 615 Basements.cccaisie ccna 3 16 
Washington............ 737 Second Story..........«s. 3 8 
ET by a eae A 735 Basement... save o6'e ee “ 10 34 
SEY ARP ous chess aa ete 733 Second Story.......... ‘ 4 12 
Brenham Place......... 9 Second Story. .,...-- sess 8 24. 
sy Scilla elstertie steed cy Third! Stony cise! seen 8 18 
66 SSB oA ae dy Fourth Story.) <<..0<0 , 6 22 
Clayperch cs iit pee ok cbs (67 Second Story............- tf 22 
Be eto lsh ea gbecta ole etetiiar Ve SQCOUG StOry.<. cess aciestied 4 12 
COP, LR RCR aie sic pees 804 Second Story.......0..... 2 8 
aca tatoietarsie nie oieypiciele alates 809 BabemMoenii ye seas wenieise 3 20 
Se Eo Rate feted ep tem cke es 812 Second Story. ss.sicanewe es 5 16 





37 


‘* Descend into the basement of almost any building in 
Chinatown at night; pick your way by the aid of the police- 
man’s candle along the dark and narrow passage-way, black 
and grimy with a quarter of a century’s accumulation of 
filth; step with care lest you fall into a cesspool of sewage, 
abominations with which these subterranean depths abound. 
Now follow your guide through a door, which he forces, into 
a sleeping-room. The air is thick with smoke and fetid 
with an indescribable odor of reeking vapors. The atmos- 
phere is tangible. Tangible—if we may be licensed to so 
use the word in this instance—to four out of the five human 
senses. Tangible to the sight, tangible to the touch, tangi- 
ble to the taste, and, oh, how tangible to the smell! You 
may even hear it as the opium-smoker sucks it through his 
pipe bowl into his tainted lungs, and you breathe it yourself 
‘as if it were of the substance and tenacity of tar. It is a 
sense of a horror you have never before experienced, revolt- 
ing to the last degree, sickening and stupefying. Through 
this semi-opaque atmosphere you discover perhaps eight or 
ten—never less than two or three—bunks, the greater part 
or all of which are occupied by two persons, some ina state 
of stupefaction from opium, some rapidly smoking them- 
selves into that condition, and all in dirt and filth. Before 
the door was opened for your entrance every aperture was 
closed, and here, had they not been thus rudely disturbed, 
they would have slept in that dense and poisonous atmos- 
phere until morning, proof against the baneful effects of the 
carbonic acid gas generated by this human defiance of chem- 
ical laws, and proof against all the zymotic poisons that 
would be fatal to a people of any other race in an hour of 
such surroundings and such conditions.” 


The Expenses,of the Prison Greater than the 
Taxes Paid. 


Mr. Badlam, Assessor of San Francisco, testifies: 


‘*The population of San Francisco of the year 1884 is 
about two hundred and fifty thousand; of that about thirty 
thousand are Chinese. The Chinese pay about one-three- 
thousandth part of the taxes.” 


The Committee compiled, from the returns of the assessors 
of the counties in the State in 1884, the following: 


‘‘ The assessed value of all the property in the State is, in 
round numbers, six hundred millions. The total population 
of the State is about 750,000, and the Chinese population is 


38 


more than one-sixth of the whole. The Chinese population, 
amounting to at least one-sixth of the whole, pay less than 
one-four-hundredth part of the revenue required to support 
the State government.” 


The net cost to the State for each prisoner is about thirty 
cents per day, and this without taking into consideration the 
cost of the prison buildings. The net cost to the State of 
keeping one hundred and ninety-eight Chinese prisoners in 
the State Prison is not less than $21,600 per annum—a sum 
$12,000 in excess of the whole amount of the taxes collected 
from all the Chinese of the State. | 

The millionaires of New York are not as expert in evading 
the assessors of that State as are the Chinese in California. 
Long custom of evading the demands of the mandarins in 
their own country have made them secretive and deceptive 
to the extent of owning nothing taxable when the assessors 
are about. 


“The Peaceful and Innocent Strangers” to whom 
the Prison is as a First-class Hotel, 


To human beings who relish as food the portions of ani- 
mals rejected by the European, and feast on almost every 
unclean thing—creatures who can live, as seen in the statis- 
tics of the cubic air ordinance—the American prison is an 
acceptable change of diet and lodgings. The numbers who 
have been sent to. the city and county jail for violating the 
cubic air ordinance are counted by the thousands. Too 
cunning to pay fines, they accept board and lodging in prison 
at the county’s expense. ‘To punish them is an impossibility, 
unless resort is had to that which would create a howl 
throughout the Hastern States, and call forth from the 
United States Courts the usual decision, ‘‘ unconstitutional 
and conflicting with treaties.” Of the adult population in 
the State the Chinese have committed far more murders, 
thefts and other great offences than the white population, in 
proportion to their number. 

D. J. Murphy, formerly District Attorney and now Supe- 
rior Judge, testified before the Committee: 


39 


‘*T have looked on my docket for two years and I find that 
of seven hundred cases that I have examined before the 


Grand Jury, one hundred and twenty were Chinese—princi- | 


pally burglaries, grand larcenies and murders. They ‘are 
very adroit and expert thieves. I have not had time to ex- 
amine for the last two and a half years, but the proportion 
has largely increased during that time. In capital cases 
particularly we are met with perjury. I have no doubt but 
that they act under the direction of superiors and swear as 
ordered. In many cases witnesses are spirited away, or 
alibis are proven. They can produce so many witnesses as 
to create a doubt in the minds of the jurymen and thus 
escape justice.” 

Judge Davis Louderback of the Police Court testified as 
follows to the question: 

Q.—‘‘ What are the difficulties in the way of the admin- 
istration of justice where the Chinese are concerned ?” 
_ A.—‘‘ As witnesses, their veracity is of the lowest degree. 
They do not appear to realize the sanctity of an oath, and it 
is difficult to enfore the laws where they are concerned for 
that reason. They are very apt, in all cases and under all 
circumstances, to resort to perjury and the subornation of 
perjury. They also use our criminal law to revenge them- 
selves upon their enemies, and malicious prosecutions are 
frequent.” 


Cleanliness which is not next to Godliness. 


When you look at your cook with his clean white apron 
displayed to its best advantage, and see the kitchen most 
carefully washed, and everything bright and in its proper 
place, it becomes impossible to realize that the same cook 
came from the dens of filth we have described, and that he 
will return to them at every favorable opportunity. No such 
. protean changes can be effected by any of the European race, 
and hence, being foreign to our own nature, we cannot be- 
lieve it to be a possibility. So distinct and far removed are 
the mental characteristics of the Chinese from the white 
man, that the latter finds nothing in himself which will lead 
to a proper conception or comprehension of the former. 

When you look at the simple and child-like smile, and 
hear the gentle assent to all your propositions and com- 
~ mands, you will not, you cannot believe that to every offence 


40 
I 

you give, vengeance as treacherous as it is nasty will surely 
but secretly follow. Offend your cook! He will be hum- 
ble, docile, non-resistant, and present no evidence of having 
received an offence; he is too subtle for that; and you leave 
him believing that your masterly dignity has crushed him; 
but he will have his revenge. He will hawk from his throat, 
spit, or blow his nose into the soup he is cooking for you; 
or mix with the stews he is cooking for your dinner more 
filthy things. 

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With a people who are speedy to revenge, but who will 
show no anger at the time of the offence, you are as with the 
subtle serpent. The hatred of the whites is openly ex- 
pressed toward the Chinese. The Chinese have no less 
malignancy toward the whites; and this is expressed, not by 
open utterances or acts, but in covert and secret ways. 

They who have watched them in the cigar factories see 
them blow their noses, and clear their throats, and cast the 
result among the tobacco destined to be smoked by white 
men. In the kitchen they are often seen to take water into 
their mouths and blow it out into the dough to moisten it, 
as the laundrymen do to the clothes. When the rolls or 


41 


biscuits come out of the oven they sometimes put an extra 
gloss upon them by squirting water out of their mouths as 
from a pulverizator. . 
They who estimate the Chinaman as a non-resistant are 
far away from the facts. He is a resistant, and an agegres- 
sive one, beyond all the conceptions of those who have not 
had years of experience with them. Subjected in their own 
country to the tyranny of their superiors in rank and wealth, 
they are schooled to hide their anger and smother their 
tendencies to resist. They therefore satisfy their longings 
for vengeance by doing that which will confer a wrong, but 
which they expect will be unknown. Mr. Oliphant says: 
‘*A Chinaman has wonderful command of feature. He 
generally looks most pleased when he has the least reason 


to be so, and maintains an expression of imperturbable 
politeness and amiability when he is secretly and devoutly 


regretting that he cannot bastinade you to death.” 


It has been said that there are persons who can ‘‘smile 
and murder as they smile, and cry content to that which 
grieves the heart;” and that a man may ‘‘ smile and smile, 
and be a villain.” These in all other countries are individ- 
ual characteristics. It can only be said to apply asa trait of 
national character to the entire Chinese people. The face of 
an European expresses to a considerable extent his thoughts, 
passions, or intentions. Not so the features of a Chinaman. 
You may find the direction the cross-eyed man looks, but 
you cannot discover the direction of the thoughts of a China- 
man. Therein all Americans are deceived, for the most 
child-like innocence is assumed even when their thoughts 
are deadly, and assassinations occur when least expected. 
It is in the dark, when they can act with the least fear of 
detection, that they become the most dangerous. 


_ The Chinese as Gamblers. 
We take from the official report made to the Supervisors 
the following: 


“ We are met with the most positive evidences that the 
Chinese population openly defy the State and municipal 
laws. ‘These laws are strong enough, as has been conclu- 


42 


sively proved, to shut up the gambling houses run by white 
men, and to make the gambler completely amenable to the 
majesty of the law. It is not so in Chinatown. The barri- 
eaded gambling dens in Chinatown are veritable citadels 
and strongholds, built to defy assault and to baffle police 
interference. The list comprises about 150 places, the ap- 
proaches to which are through a series of plank and iron 
doors; in every instance with grated windows, cunningly 
devised trap-doors for escapes, and in many instances iron- 
clad walls or partitions. Many of these doors bear the 
marks and indentations of the sledges of the police who have 
assailed them from time to time, which attack has usually 
been successfully resisted, however. When the attack has 
been successful, they have secured time long enough to en- 
able every evidence of the gambling games carried on within 
to be destroyed before the assailants were admitted. The 
convenient water-closet or kitchen fire, always adjacent to 
and forming part of these dens, furnish ready means to de- 
stroy the ‘tan’ markers or lottery devices. When the police 
force an entrance they find the most innocent-looking celes- 
tials sitting ‘child-like and bland,’ apparently in wonder 
why they have been disturbed; and against whom no charges 
can be successfully maintained in the Courts.” 























A lottery den. 


The Grand Jury in their report say: 


‘Tt is generally well known that gambling does exist to a 
great extent among the Chinese in this city, but it is diff- 


4 


43 


cult to surprise'them in the act or to arrest the offenders. 
These gambling houses are so well protected by heavy iron 
plating on doors and walls, and so well supplied internally 
with means of exit through trap-doors and skylights that it 
is almost impossible for the police, however vigilant, to sur- 
prise the gamblers.” 


Lottery Associations among the Chinese. — 


The reporter of the Chronicle, who has spent much time in 
Chinatown, writes: | | 


“The Chinese Lottery Protective Association consists of. 
twenty-five separate companies with an aggregate capital of 
$1,000,000, and an individual capital varying from $20,000 
to $60,000. The wealthiest of these organizations are the 
Yonk Tai Company, the Tuk Tut, Fook Tai, Tai Loi, Yum 
Kie, Kwong Tai and Wing Tai. The strongest is that en- 
titled Tai Loi, whose place of business was raided by the 
police a few weeks since, where, besides several millions of 
lottery tickets, a large quantity of opium was seized. There 
is every precaution taken on the part of the Chinese to keep 
their places of business secret from the vulgar public. 
Huge sheet-iron doors guard the rooms; guards are every- 
where on the alert to give the signal of an impending attack. 

‘‘Gambling is an exciting mania. There are few who 
have been approached who have not succumbed to the glib | 
arguments of the Chinese lottery agent. The greatest num- 
ber of victims are those of the gentler sex. Young ladies 
and their mothers, servants and their beaux, are liberal 
patronizers of these lotteries. Among the many agents em- 
ployed by these lotteries to sell tickets are the washermen 
and fruit-peddlers, whose duties take them into the houses 
they otherwise could not enter. Some idea of the vastness 
of these lottery transactions may be gained’ when it is esti- 
mated that no less a sum than $15,000 to $20,000 daily, or 
$6,000,000 yearly, finds its way into the hands of the Chinese 
through the lottery traffic. The largest shareholders in 
these enterprises are the wealthiest of the Chinese mer- 
chants, who run no risk, as, in three-card monte, the bank 
generally wins.” 


Reading the above, you very naturally ask: Why do the 
State and municipal authorities permit the erection of bar- 
ricades, iron doors, etc., which so effectually resist the 
police in the execution of their duties ? The answer readily 
presents itself to every legal mind: The United States laws 


44 


permit every man to do within his house almost every and 
anything, and he may put in iron doors or erect barricades 
to his own satisfaction. The framers of these laws never 
contemplated the existence of a people so cunning and 
vicious as the Chinese; they made the laws to cover a homo- 
genous population; to govern a people whose customs, 
habits and manner of gaining a livelihood were similar. 


Special Legislation Necessary. 

Where two races so distinct and opposite exist together, 
the legal yoke should be shaped to each. The United States 
laws are made as if the Chinese and Americans could assimi- 
late and be as one. The State laws are made with reference 
to the fact that assimilation is neither desirable nor pyrac- 
ticable. If the United States Courts would not interfere 
with the State and municipal legislation, there would be no 
iron doors or barricades to prevent the police from doing 
their duty. On the other hand, all the Chinese in the 
Pacific States would emigrate to other countries, and a very 
large number go to the east of the Rocky Mountains, there 
to act as missionaries, in the conversion of editors, ministers, 
and all others who cannot understand the Chinese question, 
until, by friction, actual contact, and losses in their busi- 
ness, they are compelled to a true knowledge of the subject; ' 
proselyting them to the belief that, if all the scourges the 
white man had ever been exposed to were concentrated, they 
would not in their aggregate parallel that of the presence of 
the Chinese among them. Until the National Government 
appreciates the sufferings of those who are in daily contact 
with the Chinese, the people of San Francisco must ‘‘ grin 
and bear ” their calamities. 

A thoughtless boy brought to his father’s house a bull 
pup, upon whom he had placed his affections. To test his, 
qualities he persuaded his father to get down on his hands 
and knees and play dog. This he did, to the delight of his 
son. The pup soon proved that he was a bull pup in the 
first degree. He took the ear of the old man into his mouth 
with the usual unrelenting grip, and when the old man cried 
aloud the son cried still louder: ‘‘ Be patient, dad; grin and 
bear it, father; it will be the making of the pup.” 


45 


Opium-smoking, as Introduced and Spread, by 
Wash-houses.and Opium-dens. 


The qualities of goodness are not to be measured by the 
intentions, nor are the graces of the Christian to be esti- 
mated by the profession. ‘There are no teachings of the Bible 
which can be interpreted to mean, that the moral condition 
of our own race should be neglected or made worse in the 
too earnest effort to convert the heathen. 

When the vices introduced by those who come from 
heathen lands tend to corrupt, demoralize, and lead to the 
physical and moral destruction of the young men and women 
of our country, it becomes the duty of all men to compre- 
hend the importance of the evil of the immigration in all its 
bearings. 

To have but the single thought and purpose of the mind 
directed to the making angels of the heathen, at the same 
time closing the eyes, the ears, and all sources from which 
a proper knowledge and understanding can be derived of the 
want, deprivation, misery, crime and degradation caused by 
the vicious habits and diseases introduced by the Asiatic 
races who come to this country, partakes of the narrowness 
of the many in the Atlantic States, who will do nothing to 
alleviate the sufferings of their neighbors, but will encourage 
the coming of those who will bring diseases and habits 
which will destroy many of their own race. 

Of this class are the enthusiasts, pursuing a course de- 
rived from a single text of Scripture, without reference to 
the whole, and pushing forward to its destructive results. 
These, when disaster has followed their acts and teachings, 
will seek to shelter themselves from the consequences of 
their own errors and the wrath of their fellow-citizens by 
pleading that their intentions were good. It has been said 
that ‘‘Hell is paved with good intentions.” If so, then 
even and exact justice demands that all such men should 
walk these pavements until their sins are purged away. 

The vice of opium-smoking, introduced by the Chinese 
who have come to America, has destroyed the intellect and 
alienated from the love they should have for the moral 


46 


teachings of the Bible, more young men and women in the 
United States than all the missionaries of the country have 
ever converted of the Chinese to Christianity. This is a 
fact awful to contemplate, but before which, every pro- 
Chinese citizen of America should pause and reflect; then 
ask themselves if they do not owe a duty to the natives of 
their own country superior to that which they owe to opium- 
smoking foreigners. 

Every Chinese wash-house in the cities and towns of the 
United States is an opium-joint or den, or contains China- , 
men who smoke opium; therefore, every city and almost 
every town has within itself an active source from whence the 
contagion of this habit may spread. What the attending 
horrors and ruin of opium-smoking is should be known by 
every man and woman. 


All Men Should Know of the Drug which Most 
Disastrously Enslaves. 


In the larger cities there may be found in the book-stores 
treatises upon the opium habit written by men who have 
devoted much attention to the subject. Every person should 
read some one of these works before they consider them- 
selyes competent to have a valuable opinion upon Chinese 
immigration. From among a very large amount of interest- 
ing matter found in Dr. H. H. Kane’s ‘‘ Book on Opium- 
Smoking,” published by G. P. Putnam & Sons of New York, 
we extract the foliowing: 


‘‘Tn the year 1875 the authorities of San Francisco, after 
exhausting every means of suppressing the habit of opium- 
smoking, succeeded in closing the Jarger smoking-houses, 
but the small dens in Chinatown were well patronized, and 
the vice grew surely and steadily. The very fact that 
opium-smoking was a practice forbidden by law seemed to 
lead many, who would not otherwise have indulged, to seek 
out the low dens and patronize them, while the regular 
smokers found additional pleasure in continuing that about 
which there was a spice of danger. It seemed to add zest to 
their enjoyment. Men and women, young girls, virtuous or 
just commencing a downward career, hardened prostitutes, 
representatives of the ‘hoodlum’ element, young clerks and 
errand boys, who could ill-afford the waste of time and 


47 


money, and the young men who had no work to do, were to 
be found smoking together in the back rooms of laundries, 
in the low, pestilential dens of Chinatown, reeking with 
filth and overrun with vermin, in the cellars of drinking 
saloons and in houses of prostitution. No one can question 
the fascination of a vice, the strength of a habit, that will 
lead people into such degradation for the gratification of the 
abnormal appetite. No one can question the certainty of 
moral ruin, the charring and obliteration of every honest 
impulse and honorable sentiment, the sweeping away of 
every vestige of modesty by such associations and such 
surroundings. It needs no sign-board to mark the terminus 
of this road.” 


The Ruin and Desolation Following Opium- 
smoking. 


‘Tt is thus seen how fascinating a habit that of opium- 
smoking is, and with what rapidity it is spreading all over 
the country, ensnaring individuals in all classes of society, 
leading to the downfall of innocent girls and the debasement 
of married women, and spreading its roots and growing in 
spite of the most stringent measures looking to its eradica- 
tion. 

‘‘The question will be naturally asked, of what class are 
those whosmoke opium? The answer is: representatives of 
all classes—merchants, actors, gentlemen of leisure, sporting 
men, telegraph operators, mechanics, ladies of good families, 
actresses, prostitutes, married women and single girls. 
Those who have most leisure, those on whose hands time 
hangs heavily, are the most prone to drift into it and be 
carried away by it. Essentially a nervous people, prone to ex- 
cess in everything, gladly welcoming narcotics and stimulants, 
we go to very decided excess in all matters of this kind. Upon 
the morals of the individual the effects are well marked. 
The continued smoking of this drug plunges the victim into 
a state of lethargy that knows no higher sentiment, hope, 
ambition or longing than the gratification of this diseased 
appetite. It blunts all the finer sensibilities, and cases the 
individual in a suit of vicious armor that is as little likely to 
be pierced by the light of true morality as a rhinoceros hide 
by a willow twig. To him Heaven is equivalent to plenty of 
the drug; Hell to abstinence from it. Once fastened upon 
the victim, the craving knows no amelioration; it is a steady 
growth, with each succeeding indulgence gaining strength as 
the huge snowball gains in circumference and weight by its 


48 


onward movement. No wonder that laws have failed to blot 
it out. A man may wish to be free from it, as may a dove 
in the talons of an eagle, or a lamb in the embrace of a tiger, 
and with as little good result. The awakening comes too 
late.” 

Mr. Lord, the United States Consul to Ningpo, says: 


‘‘Opium-smokers must have opium, and in most cases 
they must have it in increasing quantities. ‘To obtain it no 
obstacleis too great to be overcome. They will part with 
everything for it, sacrifice everything that is sacred. The 
wretch who is given to opium is lost to everything else. 
His land, his house, his bed, his clothes, his food, his wife, 
his children, and even his life will be consumed on the altar 
of this terrible Moloch.” 


How the Young are Seduced and Ruined by 
Opium-smoking. 
Burt Hale, in the San Jose Mercury, says: 


‘In the great city of San Francisco, boys, yes, and girls, 
with the look of cunning, blasé, old men and women sneak 
out of the vile alleys in the Chinese quarters and elsewhere; 
out into the beautiful sunshine and refreshing sea breeze 
with such expression of weariness, duplicity, vice and reck- 
lessness combined on every face, that the busy passer-by 
stops to pity and abhor. 

‘The toolish, misguided boy, deceiving father and mother 
and employer, deems it something smart and clever to 
‘visit a joint’ or ‘to hit the pipe.’ The poor young fool 
stifles both conscience and his nostrils and pretends to look 
approvingly and with the eye of a connoisseur on the box of 
deadly poison; and, holding in the flame the dirty bowl, 
charged with the perforated ball, draws death, dishonor and 
disease in fatal inhalation. 

‘‘It is the road to speedy decay and rapid dissolution. 
An idolatry that has slain more thousands than Juggernaut. 
It is the curse of China. An impending evil that, trans- 
planted here, if not rooted out, would, before the dawn of 
another century, decimate our youth, emasculate the coming 
generation, if not completely destroy the white population of 
our coast. 

‘‘This pernicious habit is on the increase all over the 
State and more especially in the large cities. Many bright 
young men, including two, at least, graduates of our uni- 
versity, have died from its effects within the last year. The 


i 


9 


police records of San Francisco show the arrests of hun- 
dreds of both sexes annually, many of them youths of re- 


999 


spectable exterior, in the vilest of Chinese ‘ joints. 





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His regular patrons. 


Sir ©. Forbes writes: ‘‘ For fascinating seductiveness, 
immeasurable agony and apalling ruin, the world has yet to 
see its parallel.” And Barnes says: ‘‘ Not the reptile with 
its fascinating eye draws the impotently fluttering bird so 
surely within its gaping jaws. Opium is a spirit of evil as 
treacherously beguiling as is the arch-fiend himself.” 

A Chinese scholar, quoted by Williams, thus sums up the 
ill effects of opium, which he says ‘‘is taken first to raise 
the animal spirits and prevent lassitude. It may be com- 
pared to raising the wick of a lamp which, while it increases 
the blaze, hastens the exhaustion of the oil and extinction 
of the light. Hence the youths who smoke will shorten their 
own days and cut off all hope of posterity, leaving their 
parents and wives without anyone to depend upon. From 
the robust who smoke, the flesh is gradually consumed and 
worn away, and the skin hangs like a bag, their faces be- 
-come cadaverous and black, and their bones naked as billets 
of wood. The habitual smokers doze for days over their 
pipe without appetite; when the desire for opium comes on 
they cannot resist its impulse. Mucus flows from their 
nostrils and tears from their eyes; their bodies are rotten 

4 


50 


and putrid. The poor smoker who has pawned every article 
in his possession still remains idle, and when the periodical 
thirst comes on, will even pawn his wives and sell his 
daughters. 


The Hopelessness and Despair of the Opium- 
smoker. 


Dr. A. P. Meylert, in his book published by Putnam & 
Co., New York, describes the impotency of the opium 
habitué thus: 


“The enchantress is now changed to a dragon, which 
holds him under a magic spell. He resolves to be free from 
bondage to a degrading appetite. To give strength for 
thought, reflection and plan of action an extra portion is 
taken. Under its influence he is brave and resolute. He 
now determines to reform or die in the attempt. Soon, 
however, he becomes dispirited, depressed, anxious. If he 
persists, and allows the time to pass without his daily dose, 
a great distress takes possession of him. He falls asleep, 
but frightful dreams quickly waken him, trembling and cry- 
ing out in terror. The judgment has come.and the evil one 
is reaching out his great brown hand to seize him! Time 
seems to stand still. He stares at the clock, saying: are 
there sixty minutes in an hour? No, there are sixty hours 
in every minute. At one moment he is burning up, then he 
shivers with cold. Perspiration streams from every pore. 
Neuralgic pains torture successively his head, limbs, joints, 
arms, chest and back. Indeed, every nerve of his body 
seems to cry out, and nerves are discovered where none 
were known to him before. A peculiar indescribable sensa- 
tion, more severe than actual pain, torments him from head 


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51 


to foot. Obstinate vomiting sets in, followed by persistent, 
exhaustive diarrhoea. Finally, in deep humiliation, in 
anguish and tears, he gives up the attempt and bows in 

subjection to his merciless master. : 

‘* Nothing is so suggestive of demoniacal passion as the 
conduct of the confirmed habitué when suddenly deprived of 
his drug. He finds himself a captive unable to escape from 
- his prison house. He tries again and again, ineffectually. 
If ever a poor soul needed help he does, and that quickly. 
At length he passively yields to what he calls his fate. “A 
little longer and he comes to enjoy it. He continues to de- 
nounce others for placing him there, but makes no further 
effort to escape. He becomes intensely selfish and supreme- 
ly self-conscious. He lives in an imaginary world of his 
own creation. He is its central figure. Nothing grows on 
its soil but the poisoned fungus. Everyone suffers from 
contact with him. Those who refuse to minister to his de- 
praved appetite, be they father, mother, wife or child, are 
hterally, passionately denounced and cursed. ‘Thus he goes 
on from bad to worse, and then cometh the end. 

‘‘Tt should be understood that opium habituation means 
death—mental, moral and physical. He who cannot in- 
stantly drop the drug is drifting towards destruction. He 
does not see it, perhaps. Like the Rhine boatman, gazing 
at the vision of beauty upon the cliff above him, he is swift- 
ly dashed upon the rocks below. And what does the 
habitue himself think as he goes down the dark valley? 
The sun shines, the birds sing and the flowers bloom, but 
not for him. Nature itself is turned against him. The 
bright day with its wealth of beauty serves but to mock him. 
He seeks consolation from the Bible, but. there is no 
promise, no hope for him. Hé remembers only the words, 
‘ All thy waves and thy billows have gone over me; the sor- 
rows of death compassed me about; the pains of hell got hold 
upon me; while the undercurrent of his tortured mind re- 
peats as arefrain, ‘I have trodden the wine-press alone— 
alone; there was none to help—none to help.’ 

«The night comes on, closing around him like the pitiless 
tide upon the poor wretch on the shoals. He feels the hor- 
ror of a great darkness, thick, heavy, penetrating every part 
of him. Every nerve of the body seems to take on conscious 
thought; and such thought! There is no past but that sep- 
arated from the present by the great gulf—fixed, impassible. 
There is no future save the bottomless pit of eternal despair, 
everlasting, with no ray of light forever and forever. And 
what of the present? The present—a thousand years of 


52 


agony in a single night. Who can endure, even to think, of 
such suffering night after night, such shuddering fear of the 
terrible unknown, until at break of day the sun brings par- 
tial respite, and uneasy sleep comes to the weary sufferer ? 
Who can wonder that the mind soon gives way under such 
a strain as this?” 

They who would more fully comprehend the suffering of 
the opium habitué should consult the works of Dr, I. B. 
Mattison and Dr. F. H. Hubbard of Brooklyn, N. Y., Dr. 
E. Levenstein, London, and many other excellent books 
written on the subject by experienced men. 


The Existence of the Habit in San Francisco.—Its 
Spread Throughout the United States. 


A reporter of the San Francisco Chronicle, after many 
days’ observations in the Chinese quarter of San Francisco, 
directs attention to the alarming mannér in which that most 
degrading habit, opium-smoking, has increased in San 
Francisco during the past few years. From observations 
carefully made and from conversations held with opium- 
users, opium-sellers and policemen, it has been ascertained 
that in San Francisco alone there are, exclusive of Chinese, 
as many as from 3,000 to 4,000 persons of both sexes, whose 
ages run from 16 to 60, who are completely enslaved by the 
pipe. The number of Chinese smokers in the city is almost 
past finding out. There is scarcely a house in Chinatown, 
from the lowest hovel to the abodes of the wealthy, where a 
layout cannot be seen. The reporter says: 

‘‘ Wishing to obtain from the lips of the opium-slaves an 
account of the influences of the drug upon the mind and 
body, I visited a large number of ‘joints’ throughout the 
city. From North Beach to South Park and from the 
Water-front to the City Hall the dens were found, dotting 
the surface of the city in all directions, as if the germs of 
disease had been wafted by the winds from the loathsome 
hot-beds in Chinatown; and had fallen at random and taken 
root in the soil. One could hardly imagine to what an 
alarming extent the horrible practice has spread in this city 
unless he should see the indisputable proofs before him. A 
few years ago there was scarcely a den outside of China- 
town, but now almost all the second-class lodging-houses in 


53 


what is known as the Southern District have a room where 
smokers can ‘hit the pipe.’ This is perfectly lawful, as it 
has been decided that a man has as much right to smoke 
opium in his own room as he has to smoke tobacco. At any 
time of the day or night, young men, whose faces have lost 
all traces of health, and whose skin looks like wax; whose 
eyes have a lack-lustre appearance; whose forms have wasted 


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54 


away until they are almost skeletons; whose countenance’ 
have lost all appearance of honesty—may be seen skulking, 
with the peculiar, light, rolling gait customary to the slaves 
of the pipe, towards the resorts where the opium is doled 
out by villainous-looking Chinese.” 

The Grand Jury, in their reportin May, 1886, uses the fol- 
lowing language: 

‘“We much regret to find that the insidious and destruc- 
tive vice of opium-smoking is increasing among the Chinese 
here, and by them being rapidly communicated to the lower 
classes of our white population. This presents a new and 
alarming social evil from which our country has hitherto 
been supposed to be exempt. Few recognize how wide- 
spread this evil has become in our midst. Judging the 
extent of its prevalence by the number of its victims, it is 
a vice which, in our opinion, calls for the most prompt and 
radical legislation possible to stamp it out.” 


If the good and Christian people east of the Rocky Moun-— 
tains would but recognize the people on the west side as 
_ being equal to themselves in intellect, morals, culture and 
all the attributes that they themselves enjoy, they would 
profit by their experience and sufferings, and they would 
_ suspect that the presence of the Chinese among themselves 
is being disastrous to the morals and welfare of all who, by 
poverty or other causes, are brought in contact with them. 
In the city of New York the habit of smoking opium is rap- 
idly increasing, and ‘‘opium joints”’ are in every ward in 
the city. In the crowded and dirty parts of the city they 
exist in great numbers. In Mott, Park, Pell and other 
strests where mixed races exist they may be found most 
abundantly. In Philadelphia, Chicago, New Orleans, St. 
Louis and other cities these opium dens exist to an extent 
unknown to the best citizens. 


The Americans are Impelled to Excess tn alt 
Things. 

Frenchmen, Italians, Spaniards and other people in South- 
ern Kurope, with few exceptions, drink wine every day. In 
these countries but little drunkenness is seen. In Germany 
and Holland beer is the common beverage, with compara 


tively a small degree of intoxication. 
On the other hand, in the United States, both wine and 


55 


beer-drinking are followed by the taking of alcoholic drinks 
of a stronger quality, and from, this proneness to excess 
comes drunkenness and its attending evils. Americans do 
everything to excess. In fashion they are always in the ex- 
_treme. Language is not strong enough to express their 
ultraism; they, therefore, add oaths, imprecations and 
curses. Time moves too slow with them. It follows that 
this nervous, excited, and ever-active mental condition seeks 
temporary support in stimulants and narcotics. 

The Chinese, who are slower, less mentally active but 
persistent, and with greater command of themselves, rarely 
carry the opium habit to the ruinous extent Americans do; 
yet they are all made more depraved and vicious by the 
habit, and thousands are rendered wicked, malicious and 
murderous for many years; then they die as imbeciles. 


Rescued from a Chinese Opium Den. 


‘“‘ New York, May 28.—A little girl, thirteen years old, 
named Maggie Westbridge, was discovered a few days 
ago in a Chinese laundry and opium joint in Brooklyn. Her 
father is dead and her mother lives with a Chinaman. The 
place is described by the police as an opium joint of the 
vilest character, numbers of young girls being induced to go 
there and smoke the fatal first pipe which leads to ruin. 
Maggie said yesterday that more girls frequented the place 
than men. They are all American girls, too.” 


HONG LEE CO. 





56 


The Guileless Heathen. 


‘‘New York, June 9.—The Herald’s Boston special says: 
Nellie Gately, a pretty young girl who was found in the 
opium-den of Lung Wah in Cambridge, in a stupefied condi- 
tion, last night, came before the local Court to-day. She 
said she went into the place to get her brother’s collars, 
when she was seized by Chinamen, who thrust a lighted pipe 
into her mouth and compelled her smoke until she became 
unconscious. She was found in this condition when the 
police raided the den. Lung Wah was fined $30 and costs. 
The girl was discharged.” 

Slips like the foregoing may be cut from Eastern news- 
papers almost every day; but they do not attract the atten- 
tion of the one-text ministers nor the solitary text Christian, 
whose mission on earth they conceive to be the neglect of 
their own race for the questionable salvation of heathen 
souls. Nor do they attract the notice of the editor or the 
merchant, for they are dreaming of the profits to accrue from 
an imaginary trade with China; nor the so-called statesmen, 
who have never risen above being groveling politicians. 
They are so much occupied with the politics of an island, 
containing not six millions of people, that they have not in- 
formed themselves of the important fact that the Pacific 
Coast is open to all the imported vices of 800,000,000 Asia- 
tics. For the Irish vote they neglect their higher and nobler 
duties. 

The officers of the law cannot enter the house of a German, 
Englishman or other foreigner and prevent the inhabitants 
thereof from smoking tobacco or opium. The United States 
_ Courts will not permit them to enter the houses of the Chi- 
nese to stop the opium-smokers. The legislatures and the 
municipal authorities of the Pacific States have enacted laws 
to meet every form of vice brought by the Chinese, and 
especially that of opium-smoking. Livery efficient law made 
has been pronounced by the United States Courts as con- 
flicting with treaties, or as contrary to the Constitution or 
laws of the United States. 

To stay, or even keep within bounds, the opium habit, 
nothing but the expulsion from the United States of every 
Chinaman will suffice. In the towns and cities the Chinese 


57 


give to the young men and girls their first smokings without 
price. They invite them in as men do each other to drink. 
The first dozen smokes are a delight; the habit is formed; 
soon they wish to throw off the habit; it is impossible; no 
fiend ever held his victim in so tight a grasp! This the sub- 
tle Chinaman knows. The habit formed, the Chinaman has 
the profit of his investment. The young man or woman is 
his customer ever afterwards, and all they earn, he gets! 


The United States Supreme Court Nullifies State 
and Municipal Legislation. 


The most earnest prayers and supplications for relief from 
the evils of Asiatic immigration have, by petition, been pre- 
sented before Congress. These have at times contained 
more than 50,000 signatures—petitions which might be 
measured in length as if they were miles. Congressmen 
from the Pacific States have appealed at every available op- 
portunity to their fellows, but the majority, as also the weak 
and inefficient Presidents, have failed to take in the true 
situation. The people of California have declared, with 
greater unanimity than any people ever declared before upon 
any subject, that they wished to stay the invasion and get 
rid of the incubus. The Constitution of the State has been 
altered, and every form of legislative and municipal enact- 
ments have been made to lessen the spreading evils of the 
mongolian presence. 

The United States Supreme Court has denounced the 
amendments to the Constitution, and declared the laws in 
conflict with existing treaties. The heel of the majority is 
upon the neck of the minority. These treaties exist by the 
might and power of numbers. The people of the Atlantic 
States want a trade with China, and for that they stamp the 
curse on the West. 

That these people should be made acquainted with the 
grief and oppressions endured in the Pacific States, conven- 
tions have been held, statistics published, and every avail- 
able means used to inform them. It is, therefore clear, that 
nothing but that inevitable destiny which will bring the like 


58 


evils to the people east of the Rocky Mountains, will ever 
make them comprehend the magnitude of the deep damnation 
which now dwells in California and the neighboring States. 


The United States Supreme Court Declares a Fire 
Ordinance in Conflict with Treaties and the 
Constitution. 


There are 320 laundries in San Francisco; 240 of these are 
conducted by Chinese. These laundries, to about the num- 
ber of 310, are in wooden buildings, the majority of which 
are in a dilapidated condition, and are in places where, by 
their burning, much property in the neighborhood would be 
consumed. These wash-houses are used by the Chinese 
also for the purpose of smoking opium. When stupefied by 
the drug they are reckless, and fires are more frequent in © 
such houses than in any others in the city. It is one of the 
peculiarities of this people that when a fire takes place they 
immediately run away as in a stampede, and abandon the 
premises to the flames. | 

Among the fire ordinances of the city is one forbidding 
wash-houses to be in frame buildings, unless specially 
authorized by the Common Council. For violating this 
ordinance Yeck Wo and Wo Lee were arrested by the Sher- 
iff and convicted by aState Court. They appealed their case 
to the Supreme Court of the United States. Their attorneys 
filed their brief April 7th. Within thirty days after, the Su- 
preme Court gave its decision in almost the exact language 
of the brief of the attorneys for the Chinese: ‘‘ That the 
ordinance was a discrimination against the petitioners and 
all subjects of China, and contrary to the Fourteenth Amend- 
ment, Section 1977, United States Revised Statutes, Articles 
VY. and VI. of the Treaty of 1868, and Articles II. and III. of 
the Treaty of 1881 between the United States and China.” 

Now the Chinese may keep their wash-houses in the most 
dilapidated condition, and, when stupefied by opium, set 
whole neighborhoods on fire. The city is forbidden to ex- 
ercise municipal authority because the majority of wash- 
houses happen to be run by Chinese. The-.public judgment 


59 


will reverse that of the Supreme Court, and will declare the 
Court discriminates against the white citizens of the Pacific 
States. 

In 1879 a convention was called, and the Constitution of 
the State was so amended as to guard the people, as far as 
practicable, from some of the Asiatic evils. The United 
States Courts declared these amendments to be in conflict 
with existing treaties and the Constitution of the United 
States. At this time, in order to express to the world the 
opinion of the people, the question of being in favor of 
Chinese immigration or against it was voted on by a full and 
separate vote—154,638 votes being cast against immigration 
and 883 votes in favor. 

Seven years ago the people of California expressed, by a 
vote of 175 to 1, that they desired the Federal Government 
to protect them from Chinese immigration. The represen- 
_ tatives from the Pacific have begged at every Congress that 
an efficient Restriction Act should be passed. The most im- 
portant features of these have been vetoed by weak Presi- 
dents. Other acts of less efficiency have been made into 
laws. Alas! for California; the machinery to execute these 
laws are men who reflect Eastern not Western ideas; and 
the United States Courts, which interpret the laws and the 
treaties, are in accord with Eastern, not Western sentiment. 
Bound as the doomed martyrs were, California and the sis- 
ter States and Territories of the Pacific can do nothing in 
self-defense that is not met and nullified by Federal Courts 
and authorities. Having exhausted every form of supplica- 
tion to the general Government for protection against inva- 
sion, a settled despair now manifests itself in violence and 
riot. 


The Process of Change. 


The laborers of the Pacific Coast were the first to feel the 
scourge and to utter their protest. The laborers of the Hast- 
ern States will be the first to feel and resent the wrong that 
_is now fast approaching them. The politicians, following 
the majority, became opponents to further immigration, ex- 
actly as all politicians in the Eastern States will in a short 


60 


time do. Editors saw the disastrous and demoralizing effect 
of the Asiatic presence, and changed their opinion, exactly 
as every editor in the eastern part of the United States will 
do when he studies the question. And, lastly, the ministers 
of the Gospel, finding they could not make angels out of 
mongols, as their Christian brethren in the Hast expect to, 
have come to the conclusion that a white man and woman’s 
soul is quite as important to be saved as a Chinaman’s. 

When no more was known about the Chinese than is now 
known in the Kastern States, almost all Californians formed 
a good opinion of them. When all their vices, cunning and 
treachery became known, that favorable impression changed 
to detestation. The same intellectual revolution will occur 
in the Eastern States when the Chinese are fairly planted in 
the fields of labor. | 

The laws governing the human mind are uniform. Like 
causes, operating in like manner, produce like results. The 
people of the Pacific States have now been in intimate busi- 
ness and social contact with the Chinese for thirty-five years. 
The people east of the Rocky Mountains have had no such 
experience. Both of these sections contain a population of 
equal intelligence, morality and energy. When they of the 
lesser experience claim to know the most, does it not show 
‘that gall and presumption is part of their mental composition ? 
The time will come soon enough when they may speak from 
experience; then they will also have changed their opinion. 
As the people of the Eastern States welcomed the sparrows, 
until they drove from the parks and the country the birds of 
beauty and song, and became destructive in the gardens and 
in the fields, and the same people wish to banish the spar- 
row; so the people of California now wish to banish a greater 
curse. 


We may cry, Peace! Peace! But there can be no 
Peace under the Tyranny which Cones to 
Degradation. 

In the fury of despair, do not all men and women turn 
upon the cause of their ruin? The very worm will turn upon 
the foot that treads upon it. No animal exists that will not 


61 


turn upon its oppressor. It is a law as fixed and unchange- 
able as any law of nature; it is an attribute of the mind of 
man and animals, and has been so from the beginning. 
Nothing but the impairment of the intellect can lessen the 
impulse to turn upon those who do you injury. The minis- 
ters who preach to the contrary will show resentment at any 
cause which injures them. The editor will seek to punch 
the head of a rival who has taken away the patronage from 
his paper. Professors are as intolerant as musicians, who 
teach harmony. And thus on through all men and animals. 

In the archives of Philadelphia and Boston you will find 
the solemn pledges of each to the other, that certain of the 
citizens of these cities will not trade with those who do not 
condemn by word and deed, the stamp or other acts which 
concerned the interest of the colonist, and which the mother 
country sought to impose. Was that not boycotting? In the 
same archives you will find that mob violence was frequent, 
and that the property of innocent persons was thrown into 
the sea or otherwise destroyed. Were these ‘‘ riotérs,” 
‘‘hoodlums,” the ‘‘ floating scum of society ?” 

Among the sacred inheritances from our ancestors are 
boycotting and rioting in resistance to oppression. Why, 
there is not a shrimp in the Eastern cities who does not wish 
to trace his ancestry to one of these ‘‘boycotters” and 
‘‘rioters.’’ 

Our ancestors of the Revolution committed every form of 
violence in their day, that has been committed on the Pacific 
Coast in our day. Their cause was bounded by the interest 
they had in trade and commerce. ‘There was no physical 
and moral leprosy forced upon them; no bringing into their 
workshops a race to degrade labor; no opening of the ports 
to an invasion of corruption and base instincts such as the 
Federal Government now compels the Pacific States to sub- 
mit to. The British Government introduced nothing to 
destroy the manhood and womanhood of the colonist, nor 
did they compel the acceptance of an alien race whose de- 
pravity taints the moral atmosphere, as does the Asiatic race 
in the Pacific States. ‘The wrongs to the colonists concerned 
thrift, not morals! A morarchy could not commit a crime 


62 


of such magnitude. That was left for the democratic gov- 
ernment the colonist created—a crime to be committed 
‘‘under the name of liberty!’’—a tyranny of the majority 
who vote on the other side of the Rocky Mountains over the 
minority who dwell on the Pacific side. The majority want 
the trade with China, and therefore the Pacific States must 
be morally damned! How patient the Pacific States have 
been to the wrongs received at the hands of the Federal 
Government, their long suffering has shown. Upon this 
subject the editor of the San Francisco Bulletin says: 


‘‘ When the long, dark night of the Chinese slave incubus 
is taken into consideration, the historian at least will admit 
the general patience and self-restraint of our people. There 
are no instances for a long time of extreme violence toward 
the Chinese. When the fact is taken into consideration of 
the large numbers of women and helpless children who have 
been deprived of the sacred right to labor by this remorse- 
less Chinese competition, and the strong men who have been 
reduced to the condition of tramps and outcasts, it will 
probably be suggested that no Christian could have borne 
his cross with greater resignation than the State of Califor- 
nia. Such resignation was the direct offspring of trustful- 
ness in the law, and the sure relief that is bound in time to 
be obtained through it. 

‘‘ Men of long-range view will deal more kindly with the 
course of California, in connection with the form of slavery 
‘proposed to be thrust upon her, than many of the hasty 
critics of to-day. There is no change i in the sentiment of the 
State as respects the future coming of the coolies. The vote 
of 154,638 against Chinese immigration to 883 in favor of 
it, reflects the sentiment of California to-day as truly as it 
did in 1879. There is no ‘let up,’ change or weakening on 
that point. The only division of opinion relates to the course 
which should be pursued toward the Chinese who are here 
now. It will be generally admitted that 1s a duty which 
every citizen owes to his State, to civilization and to his 
children, to do all in his power to put an end to the servile 
labor in California, and to bring her industrial condition into 
complete harmony with her sister States.” 


63 


Thus Speaks the Greatest Statesman tn the 
United States. 


Of the senators from the States east of the Rocky Moun- | 
tains, the first great man to comprehend the evils of Chinese 
immigration was the Hon. James G. Blaine. 

On the 14th of February, 1879, when the bill restraining 
Chinese immigration was before the Senate, Mr. Blaine said: 


‘‘ Hither the Anglo-Saxon race will possess the Pacific 
Slope or the Mongolians will possess it. You give them the 
start to day, with the keen thrust of necessity behind them, 
and with the inducements to come, while we are filling up > 
the other portions of the continent, and it is inevitable, if 
not demonstrable, that they will occupy that space of 
country between the Sierras and the Pacific Coast. 

‘‘The immigrants that come to us from the British Isles 
and from all portions of Europe, come here with the idea 
of the family as much engraven on their minds and hearts, 
and in customs and habits, as we ourselves have. The 
Asiatic cannot go on with our population and make a homo- 
geneous element. 

‘‘T am opposed to the Chinese coming here. I am op- 
posed to making them citizens. Jam unalterably opposed 
to making them voters. There is not a peasant cottage in- 
habited by a Chinaman. There is not a hearth-stone, in the 
sense we understand it, of an American home, or an English 
home, or an Irish, or German or French home. There is 
not a domestic fireside in that sense; and yet you say it is 
entirely safe to sit down and permit them to fill up our 
country, or any part of it. 

‘‘ Treat them like Christians, say those who favor their 
immigration; and yet I believe the Christian testimony is 
that the conversion of Chinese on that basis is a fearful 
failure; and that the demoralization of the white race is 
much more rapid, by reason of the contact, than is the sal- 
vation of the Chinese race. You cannot work a man who 
must have beef and bread, and would prefer beef, alongside 
of a man who can live on rice. In all such conflicts, and in 
all such struggles, the result is not to bring up the man who 
lives on rice to the beef and bread standard, but it is to 
bring down the beef and bread man to the rice standard. 

‘* Slave labor degraded free labor. It took out its respect- 
ability, and put an odious cast upon it. It throttled the 
prosperity of a fine and fair portion of the United States in 
the South; and this Chinese, which is worse than slave 


64 


labor, will throttle and impair the prosperity of a still finer 
and fairer section of the Union, on the Pacific Coast. 

*‘ We have this day to choose whether we will have for 
the Pacific Coast the civilization of Christ or the civilization 
of Confucius.’; 

Seven years since Mr. Blaine spoke thus, and every state- 
ment made by him is the exact truth of to-day. Compare 
this with the non-committal, double-meaning, pusillanimous 
utterances of the mugwumpian statesmen now in Congress; 
and with the undecided, milk-and-water productions of the 


Presidential cabinet. 


The Federal Government, Subjecting the Pacific 
States to an Invasion from the Asiatic Races, 
should meet the Result. 


Following the suggestions of Mr. Bayard, the Secretary of 
State; the President, in his message of March Ist, 1886, to 
the Congress of the United States, upon the Rock Springs, 
Wyoming Territory, outrages, ‘‘brings the matter to the 
benevolent consideration of Congress, in order that that 
body, in its highest discretion, may direct the bounty of the 
Government in aid of the imnocent and peaceful strangers 
whose maltreatment has brought discredit upon the country, 
with the distinct understanding that such action is in no wise 
to be held as a precedent. It is wholly gratuitous, and is 
resorted to in a spirit of pure generosity toward those who 
are otherwise helpless.” 

Such reasoning does more honor to the heart than to the 
head. Like violence done to American citizens in China, 
and we would demand an indemnity, as a matter of right! 
If we intend to reserve the right to demand restitution in 
damages, which may be done to American citizens when 
within the scope of Chinese authority, we should make 
proper payment of Chinese claims for indemnification. 

But the absurdity of endeavoring to limit the good acts, 
‘* with the distinct understanding that such action is in no wise 
to be held as a precedent,” becomes manifest when you call to 
mind that in Seattle, and other towns in Washington Terri- 
tory, Americans have destroyed the property of and expelled 


65 


the Chinese. The same has been done in Idaho and every 
Territory and State west of the Rocky Mountains. That at 
this time, there are a hundred causes for indemnification, and 
that the amount which the United States Congress should 
vote to pay the ‘‘ innocent and peaceful strangers,” because 
of interrupting their operations in rooting out of their 
places, in the factory and in the field, white men and women, 
in the aggregate will exceed five millions of dollars. 

The violent expulsion, and destruction of property, and 
the damage done to the Chinese by stopping their operations 
at different places in the States and Territories of the Pacific, 
if not quite as flagrant, are yet sufficient to cause them to pre- 
sent claims which should open the United States Treasury; 
and, from their magnitude, open the eyes of Congressmen. 
All the claims rest upon the same basis. The distinction 
may be in degree, but not inkind. The payment of one calls 
for the payment of the other. A precedent necessarily be- 
comes established as soon as one of them is paid. 

The Federal Government, in its legislation tor the supposed 
benefit of the Eastern and Middle States, has brought ruin 
and disaster on the Pacific States. A conflict between the 
races of Asia and Europe has been invited and encouraged 
by the Government; and the Pacific States are to suffer in 
its desolation. As the costs of war should be paid by those 
who cause the war, so they who initiate and direct a wrong 
should promptly meet the result of resistance. 

The condition of matters, briefly stated, is this: The 
Federal Government, after acquiring the Territories by the 
arms and the revenues derived from its own people, opened 
them for settlement .to a race who could, by their civilization 
and intelligence, become citizens of the country. NATIVE 
BORN AND EUROPEANS WENT INTO THESE TER- 
RITORIES AS ‘‘ INNOCENT AND PEACEFUL STRAN- 
GERS,” with the belief that they were to be protected by 
the National Government, They took with them their wives 
and children; they entered the forest or the prairie and sub- 
dued them to culture; they made comfortable homes in 


which to rear their families; they built school-houses and 
churches in which they could educate or worship as the 
5 


66 


Christians of the highest civilization do; they built beautiful 
villages, towns and cities, and .attained a degree of intelli- 
gence not surpassed by any State in the United States. 

When our country most needed soldiers the Pacific States 
gave their sons to battle. When the treasury was bankrupt 
the States and Territories poured forth their treasures. 

Now comes the Federal Government, in its desire to feed 
the avaricious commercial appetite of the Hast, and offers as 
a living sacrifice the Pacific States, and, by its supreme 
power, blasts the future of the most beautiful heritage of 
the American people. 

A United States Commissioner is sent to China who nego- ’ 
tiates a one-sided treaty—idiotic on the part of the United 
States; exceedingly cunning on the part of China. Now the 
ports of all Asia are open to emigration, and the ports of the 
United States all open to immigration. From countries 
whose populations are more than twice as great as the entire 
number of Europeans, they begin to pour hundreds of thou- 
sands of the most vicious men into the Pacific States and 
Territories. They come with leprosy, small-pox, syphilis, 


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67 


and the diseases and vices engendered by a depraved and 
corrupt existence. They bring with them prostitutes, not 
wives. Agesof deprivation have made it as nature that they 
can live on the cheapest of food, wear the most inexpensive 
apparel, occupy apartments by numbers equal to ten, where 
the white man considers the cubic space and air only proper 
for one; and they practice an economic existence so stinted 
that none with European blood can ever debase themselves 
to live as cheaply. With these small expenses for the neces- 
saries of life they enter the fields of labor, prepared to work 
at prices which the European cannot existupon. Not handi- 
capped by the necessities of a family, or the expenses inci- 
dent to a refined life, they can underwork all who live or 
dress in a proper manner. As they are impelled to gain by 
an avarice not paralleled in the human family, so they will 
work seven days in the week and over hours each day when 
it is more profitable for them todoso. Cunning to a degree 
before unknown, the Chinaman is only honest when honesty 
is seen to be the best policy. Thus, without the embarrass- 
ment of conscience or the expense of living, they enter into 
almost every: mechanical trade or manufactory, and take from 
the European laborer the means of livelihood, and thus re- 
duce him and all who depend upon him to want and suffering. 


Mongolian Invasion of the Islands in the Pacific 
Ocean. 


From a source of supply quite equal to the entire white 
population of the world, the Chinese have entered the 
labor fields of the Islands of the Pacific and driven the 
natives from their occupations. 

The Hawaiian Islands, with whom we negotiated a re- 
ciprocity treaty, with a view to future annexation, are now so 
much in the occupation of the Chinese as to preclude forever any 
nearer relationship. Of the evils of the invasion of these 
Islands by the Chinese Mr. Schmidt discourses thus: 

‘¢ The natives as a rule regard them with intense dislike 
and even hatred. Nor is this without reason; the Chinese 


have been a grievous injury to the native Hawaiians in many 
ways. Not only have they taken their places as laborers, 


68 ‘ 


but they have constantly; by one and another means, been 
gaining possession of their landed property, until now vast 
tracts of the richest lands, particularly such as are fitted for 
rice culture, are in the hands of Chinese syndicates or in- 
dividual owners, while the entire group of islands is dotted 
with Chinese homesteads. The native is by nature improvi- 
dent and easy-going, and the Mongolian immigrants early 
learned the advantage of becoming money-lenders where 
there was such a profitable field for the pursuit of the pro- 
fession. Land and stock soon passed into the hands of the 
Chinamen, and, worse than this, in some instances where 
a more than usual spirit of degradation prevails, the family 
relations of the native are also disrupted. . 

‘‘There have been exceptional cases where Chinamen 
have married native women with the apparent intention of 
becoming permanent residents. The great majority, how- 
ever, remain single, and whether working as laborers or 
proprietors, all entertain the same object, namely: to ac- 
cumulate a fortune as soon as possible, and return with it to 
China. 

‘“* Ag common laborers, which is the status of most of. the 
Chinese on the Sandwich Islands, they receive $1 per day, 
and board themselves upon a few cents’ worth of rice a day. 
It is the difference in the cost of living, far more than in the 
rate of wages, which renders it impossible for a white laborer 
to compete with a Chinese in Hawaii.” 


At too late a period the Government is now trying to pre- 
vent the further entrance of the Chinese into the Islands. 
The Hawaiian Islands are even now a Chinese Colony so 
far as labor and productions can make them so. 


White Laborers cannot exist in China; then, why 
permit Chinese Laborers to Degrade the Work- 
men of America? 


Is it probable, or even possible, that a white laborer can work at 
the wages paid in China, even though he entered with that inten- 
tion? Can any person conceive how an European could live on 
the small amount paid there for a day’s labor? We cannot 
work as cheaply as the Chinese in our own country; surely, 
the white laborer could not exist in China. Now, if white 
laborers cannot have an existence in China, why should the 
Chinese laborer have an existence in America by virtue of 
treaties ? 


69 


If American merchants and travellers are limited to cer- 
tain districts in China, why should any greater extent of 
territory be allowed to Chinese merchants and travellers in 
America ? 

There are no American laborers now, nor can there ever be 
any in China. 

There are but a very small number of American merchants 
now living in China, and their business is rapidly declining; 
so that in a little time they will surrender it to the Chinese 
capitalists, who can deal better with their own countrymen 
than the foreigner can. 

Jf, then, neither American laborers, nor merchants, can 
have a profitable existence in China, why should we endure 
the corruption and demoralization attending the presence of 
the Chinese in the United States ? 

It is said that the first law of nature is self-protection; in 
the exercise of this, why should not Congress declare by 
one Act the exclusion of all the Chinese. If not all, then 
the most obnoxious—they who by their competition take 
from the workingman the means of subsistence ? 

The time is rapidly approaching when the necesities of 
the country will demand that no Chinese laborer shall occupy 
the place of a white laborer in the United States. The 
laboring men of the nation have felt already the degradation 
attending the Chinese presence; and they will express them- 
selves to the discomfiture of every politician whose record 
is not clear and straightforward towards absolute exclusion. 


The Political Parties must take a New De- 
parture. ‘ 


The old parties are upon the same platform; there are no 
living issues. The old Whig party had for its corner-stone 
a protective tariff; it followed that, inasmuch as the factories 
of the United States were for the most part in the North, 
the Whig party had the majority of its supporters in the 
North. 

The old Democratic party had for the chief plank in its 
platform the doctrine of free trade; and, as the South 
desired to sell cotton at the highest price, and sought to 


10 


buy manufactured goods at the lowest price, it followed that 
Democracy had its majorities in the South. To the tariff 
was added the suppression of slavery; from thenceforward 
the Whig party was merged into that of the Republican 
party. On the free trade doctrine the South grafted seces- 
sion. 

Slavery is abolished, and the majority of the Democratic 
party now advocate a tariff in some modified form. It is 
true there are a few college professors and abstract 
reasoners, who have taken in more knowledge than wisdom, 
and who are like ships too heavily laden; they wallow in the 
waves of the sea, they cannot keep pace with passing events, 
and they arrive in port after all others and too late to make 
their cargoes available; such men believe in free trade. 
And there are some merchants who profit by importations; 
they believe in free trade. And there are some men who 
believe in free trade without knowing what it means; they 
have inherited the belief. 

The ocean is a realm where free trade exists uninfluenced. 
by protective tariffs; the cheapest and most effective labor 
becomes the dominant power upon its surface. The nation 
which raises coal, produces iron, and builds ships the 
cheapest, and has for its service the best seamen, at the 
lowest wages, has now the carrying trade of the world. 


Tendencies of Trade and Manufactures towards 
Countries of the Cheapest Labor. 


The law of the attraction of gravitation is not more in- 
evitable in its tendencies, than that manufacturing will find 
the countries of the cheapest labor, provided that labor is 
efficient. The low wages upon which the Chinese, Japanese, 
and Hindostanese laborers subsist in their own country, will 
cause Asiatic and European capitalists to establish manufac- 
tories, and avail themselves of the profits of labor so far 
below that which is necessary for the subsistence of a white 
laborer. It is an error of the most serious importance, when 
the European overestimates his own power in the fields of 
trade and manufactures; and underestimates the qualities of 
perseverance, industry, cunning, the cheap mode of existence 


71 


and the capital which the Asiatic brings to the same fields 
in competition with him. 

In the confidence that their position is forever fixed, and 
that they are too smart to be driven out of the markets of 
the world by such a contemptible and idiotic-looking race 
as the Mongolian, the Eastern manufacturer acts with the 
majority, and looks placidly at the defeat of the white 
manufacturer in the Pacific States. They cannot forget 
their own importance long enough to take in the more im- 
portant truth, that Chinese capitalists command the cheap- 
est labor in the world, at a percentage less than the same. 
labor can be employed by Europeans. 


Whom the Gods Destroy they first make mad. | 


As if it had been decreed that the time of the departure 
of the manufacturing industries of the country should be 
hastened, they who gain the means of living by the wages of 
their labor have made an organized attack on their em- 
ployers, and sought to dictate terms and conditions to 
capital. 

This is a most serious mistake; for on the one side capital 
is as ‘‘ the Arab who silently folds his tent and steals away;” 
on the other side, the law governing the wages of labor is as 
fixed as the Divine law which compels men to labor. Jf the 
demand for labor 1s increased, wages also increases; diminish 
the demand, or increase the number of laborers and the wages 
wil decrease accordingly. 

The unfruitful strife between ree and capital, history has 
always shown, does terminate at last in this wnchangeable rule: 
SUPPLY and DEMAND. 

The laborer who becomes a Kintalit, or joins the Labor 
Union, has enlisted as the soldier, who can no more com- 
mand his own actions or gratify his own desires. 

A strike is ordered, he obeys even though his family be 
in a starving condition, and he himself has no cause or 
desire to strike. In the meantime, capital, not dependent 
upon any one investment, withdraws from manufacturing 
enterprises; or the owners of the factory closed by the strike, 
being tired of war with organized labor, seeks rest and 


12 


profit by removing the plant to Japan, or the seaport towns 
of Asia, where labor is the cheapest and most abundant. 


The Huropean Races are now Face to Face with 
the Asiatic Races. 


The great contest which has been predicted of the meeting 
of the European and Asiatic civilization has commenced. 
The first success is scored by the Asiatics. What the ter- 
mination will be is hidden from all. The fatalist may hope 
that the survival of the fittest will keep his posterity floating . 
on the top. Unfortunately, the survival of what we believe 
are the fittest rarely takes place. 

The truths of history declare that civilizations, which in 
their day and generation were as high above that of sur- 
rounding nations, as the European is above the Asiatic, 
were crushed out of existence and gave place to centuries of 
semi-barbarism. 

An issue of greater magnitude than was ever presented to 
the American people is now approaching. A contest in the 
fields of manufacture is a contest for an existence, with the 
comforts, luxuries and enjoyment we have heretofore re- 
ceived. Unsuccessful, and we ‘‘ sup sorrow with the poor.” 

The most enterprising, aggressive, and persevering, of the 
_ Asiatic races is now sending forth its millions to populate 
and command all the islands of the Pacific Ocean. In Brit- 
ish Columbia they exceed the white men in numbers. The 
census of the city ut Victoria shows, that the Chinese male 
population outnumber the white male population by one 
hundred and eleven. In that small city there are 3,180 
Chinese, laboring and conducting business to the exclusion 
of an equal number of white producers. 

The Mexican Government has invited immigration from 
China, and all the vessels arriving from Asia and landing 
in the western ports of Mexico are laden with coolies. 

The adult male, or voting population of California number 
about 198,000. The Chinese number about 100,000. 

The voting population of San Francisco is about 48,000. 
The Chinese in that city number between 30,000 and 40,000. - 
The Chinamen throughout the State bear the relation of one 


13 


to every eight of a white population composed of men, 
women and children. 

_If all the Chinese in the United States were equally di- 
vided, according to the population, among the different 
States, California would have but 2,700 for her share; 
whereas, there are now more than 100,000 in the State. All 
facts and circumstances indicate that this must be true. 
There are no available means of telling how many Chinamen 
exist in the State. No census yet taken amounts to an ap- 
proximation. As rats run away from the terrier, so do 
Chinamen flee from census takers and assessors. 

The Custom House returns, the reports of Government 
officials, and the certificate of the Chinese minister or his 
subordinates, all may declare the number of Chinese as not 
increasing in this Republic, but the fact of increase exists 
notwithstanding, as every sense possessed by man, including 
his common sense, testifies to. 

Chinatown in San Francisco visibly enlarges every month, 
so in like manner, every city in the Pacific and Atlantic 
States have more Chinamen in them now than they had one, 
two or three years ago. 


Restriction not Practicable. 


Wherever the Californian looks he finds Chinamen seek- 
ing to enter the United States. From British Columbia 
the Chinese find along the thousands of miles of boundary 
dividing it from the United States, many an opportunity to 
_ cross into the warmer and more flourishing ‘States of the 
Union. From Mexico they cross the dividing line and enter 
the United States at any place between the Pacific and At- 
lantic Oceans. 

Will any Restriction Act now passed, or that may be made 
into a law, prevent the Chinese from landing in Mexico or 
British Columbia, and then, at any favorable, opportunity, 
enter into the United States? Restrict the rats that enter 
the granary from coming by water, and ask the owner there- 
of to be contented with the restriction; demand that he keep 
all the rats he now has, and if they want to go visiting to a 
distant country, give them a certificate to come back and 


14 


feed again on his grain; open up two long lines of ingress by 
land, through which the rats may enter the granary. This 
is restriction as understood by the United States Congress. 
Stop the gophers from coming by water into the field of the 
farmer; make him keep all the gophers he has now on his 
land; but let the long line of boundary between his property | 
and that of his neighbor be open to their ingress. This is 
restriction as understood in the Atlantic States. 

To evade the execution of the restriction laws the Chinese 
_ enter British Columbia, not that they intend to live in that 
cold and inhospitable climate, but that they may pass the 
boundaries into a warmer climate without molestation from 
government officials. The bounties paid by the Mexicans to 
the companies who bring coolies to that country, has started 
a tide of emigration from Asia, which will cause riot and | 
bloodshed in every city in Mexico as soon as the novelty has 
worn away and the evil of their presence is realized; for the 
Mexicans are quick to anger, and expulsion by violence will 
be attempted by them. 

Should the United States Government place a cordon of 
officials as close together as the posts of a fence, extending 
from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans, and on the border 
line between the British Possessions on the north and the 
Mexican Possessions on the south, the Chinese would find a 
means of entrance, aS do rats—when you have closed one 
hole, they will burrow or find another. 

Only a practiced eye can distinguish one Chinaman from 
another, and this similarity enables them so to interchange 
with each other, that even the greatest precaution taken by 
officials will not prevent their. passing the guards. 


The Republican and Democratic Parties have 
Outlived their Isswes and their Usefulness. 
They should cease to exist and an honorable burial be 

accorded to them. 

The events of the day are now pressing the most import- 
ant issues ever presented to the American people. A home 
party must be created to meet these issues. The foundation, 
strength and platform of this party must rest on existing 


75 


facts, not looking to the past but to the future. Facts such 
as these, that the good tillable land now in possession of 
the National Government is not adequate in amount to the 
giving of 160 acres of land to every male in the United 
States under the age of twenty years. 

That large districts of country, such as lie between the 
Sierras and the Rocky Mountains, are barren for want of a 
proper amount of rainfall. 

That large districts in the Territories are swamp and irre- 
claimable land. : 

That other land, such as found in Alaska, is not available, 
because of the Winter’s cold. 

That as soon as there is no more Government land to re- 
heve the surplus of laborers in the cities of the United 
States, then the condition of the laborer will rapidly ap- 
proach that of the laborer in the cities of Europe. 

When the laborer from a.European city emigrates he re- 
lieves the pressure of the labor market of that city to the 
extent of his influence. So, each laborer who takes up a 
farm relieves the labor market of the city he has heretofore 
labored in. 

What Americans have attributed to a superior form of 
government, should to a very great extent be credited to the 
existence of an abundance of good, tillable land, which 
could be had for the very small consideration demanded by 
the government. | 

Within a very few years and there will be no more such 
land. When that time arrives the labor market will have 
no relief, and the test of the superiority of this Government 
to others will have come. 

There is nothing in the Constitution or form of our gov- 
ernment to prohibit the acquisition of large tracts of land 
by the rich. Nor is there anything to prevent the exact con- 
dition and relation of labor to capital as now exists in 
Europe. 

It is true, a titled aristocracy may not be honored, but we 
will bow down to amoneyed aristocracy all the same. 

When the,public lands all enter into private ownership 
then their price will rise above that which the poor man can 


76 


pay, and the condition of America will soon become as that 
of Europe. 


The Founders of this Republic did not Declare 
America was to be the Home of the Oppressed 
of all Nations. 


That was the invention of the ‘‘Fourth of July orators,” 
and a most pernicious creation it is. For the opening of 
our ports to the entrance of all the oppressed means, that 
we will admit the rankest compound of villanous wretches, 
ever conceived, born and nurtured in the baseness, ignorance 
and depravity, engendered by centuries of want and oppres- 
sion. It means that we will admit all colors and qualities 
of men. It means that our country shall become densely 
populated with mixed races, and then fall from her high 
-estate. As against impending evils, whose shadows are now 
east before them, we should ‘‘take arms against a sea of 
troubles, and, by opposing, end them.” To this end let 
the laborer, mechanic, merchant, and all join, having one 
great andimportant mission. Let them sever the allegiance 
to the political parties of the past, and bring to the ballot 
box the power and strength of unity; and, as the home party, 
let them declare positiwe and complete exclusion of all Asiatic 
laborers from the labor fields of America. Draw the line distinct 
and clear on the issue of exclusion as against its negatwe, and i 
wil be found the laborers and mechanics of America understand 
the evil of the Chinese presence better than they who belong to 
the learned professions, and that by the power of the ballot they 
will compel the removal of the Chinese from among us. 

As in the past, the pulpit will loudly proclaim its dissent 
to measures so effectual, and the press will cast its influence 
with all the force and influence which type can exert against 
exclusion. But these are on the surface of the stream; be- 
neath there is the power of numbers—the silent, undemonstra- 
tive intelligence and force of the mechanic and laborer, the great 
-“* undertow,” which, by the exercise of the ballot, commands the 
destinies of the State. 

The laborers and mechanics in every district of the nation 
have sympathized with their brethren on the Pacific Coast 


17 


in the degradation brought upon them by the competition 
with Chinese labor, and they fully recognize the evils 
brought upon themselves by the importation of laborers 
from the most ignorant and depraved countries of Europe. 


The Necessities of our Children Demand That 
the Ports be Closed, 


This nation has already received too many of the poor, 
ignorant, and criminal from the States of Europe. They seri- 
ously affect the morals and the politics of the country; and 
the time has arrived when the ports of the nation should be 
closed against all who cannot by their presence add to 
the intelligence, wealth and morality of the commonwealth. 

The most intelligent, thrifty and moral do not as a general 
proposition or rule leave the country of their birth to seek 
a home in foreign lands. They who have these qualities and 
do emigrate are the exceptions to this rule. 

The capacity to absorb and digest becomes less as the 
public land diminishes in quantity. When the overplus of 
laborers cannot find homes in the unoccupied and low priced 
lands of the country, then the laborer in the crowded cities 
exists as in a perpetual battle for life against a competition 
so numerous and so stricken by the ills of poverty, that in 
the end his manhood sinks to the level of that of the imwi- 
grant. | 

This commonwealth, possessing no more land as an outlet 
and as an assistant in the absorption’ and digestion of the 
ignorant and depraved who come within its territory, will be- 
come as the Dead Sea, which cannot discharge the wash and 
- abominations brought by the Jordan from the ‘hills and the 
valleys. 

Upon this subject the Rev. Heber Newton thus discourses: 


‘‘The State should regulate our foreign immigration. We 
have received between 12,000,000 and 13,000,000 immigrants 
in half a century, and over 4,000,000 in the last decade. 
This immigration has tended largely towards our great man- 
ufacturing centers, which it still further clogs with a surplus 
of labor, depressing wages and lowering the demand, on 
which production depends, thus leading to a shrinkage of 
the profits. Plainly we need either to restrict our immigra- 


78 


tion or to organize a distribution in the interests of the 
nation. There should be stringent legislation as to the 
financial ability and general character of those we ask to 
become citizens of our great Republic, if we desire that Re- 
public to live. Without any question, it is high time that 
the law already passed two years ago by Congress, prohibit- 
ing the importation of cheap foreign labor, under contract, 
should be vigorously enforced. It is a monstrous wrong 
that unscrupulous capital should be allowed to rake the 
cheapest labor of the Old World for material with which to 
fight our American workingmen.” 

Place the issues squarely before the people, not as tagged 
on to the professions of either or both of the present politi- 
cal parties, but as presented by a home party, it being the 
most important question ever submitted to the people of this 
country. 

First—Expulsion and absolute exclusion of all Chinese labor- 
ers from the United States. 

Second—Prohibition for all future time of entrance into the 
United States of all foreigners, whether Huropean or Asiatic, 
whose presence will tend to degrade the workingmen of the coun- 
try, and all who have not in their own country sustained an 
honorable record of wntelligence, thrift and morality. The 
laborers and mechanics are prepared to vote for the closing 
of the ports as against the most obnoxious immigrants, 
Asiatic or European, and when the question comes to a vote 
they will sustain their opinion by immense majorities. 


The Weltare of this Nation *Demands that its 
People shall be Homogenous, and that a 
Mixture of haces within its Borders be No 
longer Tolerated. 


That most stupid piece of diplomacy ever placed on rec- 
ord, known as the Burlingame Treaty, gives to the Chinese 
all that is obtained by the people of the most favored 
nation. All there is in it that relates to the immigration of 
Coolie labor is: ‘‘ The high contracting parties agree to pass 
laws making it a penal offense for a citizen of the United States 
or Chinese subject to take Chinese subjects either to the United 
States or any other foreign country; or for a Chinese subject, or 


79 


citizen of the United States to take citizens of the United Stutes to 
China or any foreign country without their free and. voluntary 
consent, respectively.” 

It is a fact supported by direct and circumstantial evi- 
dence, that more than ninety per cent. of the Chinese labor- 
ers in America are here by contracts made before their de- 
parture from Asia with companies and capitalists, and that 
these contracts are so binding and unbreakable; that it is 
doubtful if there can be a case found wherein the laborer 
has broken the bond and made himself a free man. 

The Chinese women, on the other hand, were purchased at 

a price in Asia and brought over by contract and sold for a 
_ price after arrival in the United States. 
- Nearly all the Chinese in America came through the Eng- 
lish port of Hongkong. The contracts were probably made 
there. If that treaty provided for the immigration of 
Coolies, contract labor and slaves, the Chinese may possess 
some claims of being rightfully here. But the treaty should 
instantly be burned as a monstrous crime against the Amer- 
ican people. 

In the other view, if the Chinese as bondsmen are here 
without the authority of that treaty (there being nothing in 
the treaty relating to the matter) then expulsion should fol- 
low their illegal presence. 


The American People in the Pacific States are 
there by Rights Superior to those of the 
Mongolian. 

They went there to open up the wilderness to cultivation. 
They put forth their strength and it now blossoms with the 
rose. They have made homes, beautified Cities, and planted 
_ prosperity on the ‘western shores of the nation. 

The National Government, responding to Eastern views and 
sentiment upon a subject which most affected the West, has ex- 
posed all these beautiful creations of their industry and skill to 
an immigration which has all the qualities of a conquering in- 
vasion. 

By the action and non-action of the government, labor has 
been dishonored and debased by a compulsory competition 
with the bonded labor,of Coolies. 


~ 80 


By the same power which compels the Pacific States to — 
endure the Mongolian presence, all their vices and diseases — 


are maintained in these States, and the rising generation, 
now children of great promise, are being corrupted by con- 
tact with moral and physical leprosy. 

By the ignorance, or the willful ignoring of existing facts, 
and by the morbid sentimentalism and the romantic attach- 
ment of the many, the Chinese are sustained. 

The demonstrative portion of the people in the East are 
not willing to understand, that the trade and manufactures 
of the west coast of America is passing out of the hands of 
their countrymen into the hands of the Chinese. 

These events taking place in one part of the Union, sup- 
ported and maintained by the people in another part of the 
Union, calls for what ? 

Shall the American citizens on the Pacific Coast ike into a 
condition of ‘‘ Imnocuous Desuetude” before ‘‘ the peaceful and 
innocent strangers” of President Cleveland ? 

Or shall they resent the wrongs by practicing boycotting 
and other like measures as the patriot fathers of the revolu- 
tion did? Or shall they whilst protesting against the 
tyranny of the National Government, and of the majority 
who sustain that government, enter into riot and mob vio- 
lence as did the early revolutionist when protesting against 
British tyranny ? 

They who are in high places, and are the rulers of the 
nation, should be men whose intelligence, capacity, and 
grandeur is commensurate with the necessities which now 
exist, and which will hereafter arise to a greater degree as 
the coming events cast their shadows over the manufac- 
turing States of the Union. 

In the meantime they who are in power : should in justice, 
in mercy, and in Christian charity towards members of their 
own race remove the cause of dissension and strife from the 
Pacific States. Accepting as an established and an unavoid- 
able fact, that no Federal or State laws—no Federal or State 
executive force, no potency beneath the stars can compel 
the two races to exist together in harmony. 











UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS-URBANA 


